Journal article
Ordering Is Not Resolution: What the Instruction Hierarchy Defines, What It Leaves Undefined, and the Same-Tier Conflicts Agent Benchmarks Do Not Separate
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. When a language-model agent receives instructions that conflict, the dominant remedy is a privilege ordering over sources: system above developer, developer above user, user above tool output. This paper argues that the ordering paradigm is…