Memory as a Service (MaaS): Purpose-Bound Memory Mediation for Cooperative Agents

Abstract

Agentic programming is code-centered, while its useful memory context extends beyond code. A programming agent may draw on memory from test, review, build, and release agents; design, product, security, operations, and compliance agents; meeting, finance, calendar, and workflow agents; personal agents; and agents acting for other people. These memories can help agents optimize, debug, test, and evaluate software, while carrying different owners, purposes, recipients, and disclosure boundaries. We propose \emph{Memory as a Service} (MaaS) as \emph{purpose-bound memory mediation}: each invocation is evaluated by owner, requester, recipient, task, and declared purpose, and the mediator chooses whether to \emph{withhold}, \emph{abstract}, or \emph{reveal} each candidate item. We formalize this by separating cooperative utility, disclosure leakage, and purpose-bound authorization, then ground the position with diagnostic stress tests on MAGPIE. Relevance-based retrieval reaches AUROC $0.570$ and leaks $53.0\%$ of private items; contextual-integrity prompting reduces leakage by $21.8$ percentage points while leaving $32.6\%$ residual leakage; and $4.5\%$ of private items contain explicit safe-hint abstractions. These probes motivate memory governance as a separate design problem for cooperative programming agents.

arXiv commentAccepted to the KDD 2026 Workshop on Agentic Software Engineering (AgenticSE @ KDD 2026)