Download the "Java EE7 Full & Web Distribution" of Wildfly 13 and extract it on your system Download the attached TestWAR.war and create an exploded deployment in the standalone/deployments folder of the Wildfly 13 download – make sure the exploded deployment is called TestWAR.war Alongside the exploded deployment, create a TestWAR.war.dodeploy file Start Wildfly 13: # Default config works fine cd $WFLY_INSTALL_DIR/bin ./standalone.sh You should see that the TestWAR gets deployed and a single EJB is bound In the current deployment, there is a jboss-ejb-client.xml with the following contents: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <jboss-ejb-client xmlns="urn:jboss:ejb-client:1.2"> <client-context> <ejb-receivers></ejb-receivers> </client-context> </jboss-ejb-client> One would expect that the local ejb receiver should use pass-by-value semantics since the attribute is not explicitly configured and the default is true In your browser, navigate to http://localhost:8080/TestWAR/ You will see the results of printing an EJB parameter's object reference from both outside and inside the EJB invocation. The object reference is the same, which is not expected. Inside the exploded TestWAR deployment, delete the jboss-ejb-client.xml deployment descriptor located in the META-INF folder Restart Wildfly and again navigate to http://localhost:8080/TestWAR/ With the complete absence of the deployment descriptor, pass-by-value semantics are correctly used. Source code for TestWAR.war is included inside the archive.