<p>This paper investigates the output containment control problem of unknown heterogeneous non-minimum phase linear multi-agent systems over directed communication graphs. The dynamics of each follower are allowed to be unknown. A novel distributed adaptive pole placement control strategy is developed to address the output containment control problem of the concerned multi-agent system. It is shown that the proposed distributed adaptive control strategy guarantees the boundedness of all the signals in the resulting closed-loop system and the convergence of the followers’ outputs to a convex hull spanned by the leaders’ outputs. The efficacy of the proposed control strategy is demonstrated by two simulation examples.</p>