Jan 11, 2026
AI Swarms Manipulation: How Coordinated Infiltrator Agents Shift Community Beliefs
Publius Dirac, Anantha Shakthi Ganeshan Thevar, Babita Singh
We simulate how a small group of sophisticated AI agents ("infiltrators") can manipulate a larger community of less capable AI agents into adopting a specific belief. It models real-world information influence campaigns to help understand vulnerabilities to coordinated manipulation. We find that even a single infiltrator achieves high belief adoption, but pre-seeded dissenters act as "antibodies" that can reverse adoption over time, suggesting viewpoint diversity provides natural resistance to manipulation.
Studying coordinated influence and manipulation in multi-agent systems is highly relevant given the current trajectory of LLM development and deployment. It's interesting that a few "antibodies" can partially negate a coordinated attack, and I'd like to see this explored with higher sample sizes and repeated runs. I think the biggest weakness is clearing agents' context each timestep (which the authors acknowledge due to compute constraints) -- this makes the setup meaningfully different from real dynamics.
I would like to see this project continue at a larger scale as we see more agent-to-agent interactions on the horizon. And perhaps we should see this project continue on actual social networks with interactions with humans. It feels like an important area, and the result of anti-bodies being able to regularize manipulation seems like something we should be exploring more. Great job.
Love to see a verification test on a theoretical work. As far as I can tell, this is the first attempt at seeing how agents can manipulate each other in social platform dynamics. The anti-bodies is a great exploration and result.
The execution is solid considering the time constraints, but there is clear areas of improvement here. Would have boosted the score if simulation ran with larger populations and multiple beliefs were tested. Would also have been impactful to do multiple runs to see reproducibility or statistical significance.
Well explained. Good structure of report. Useful graphics. Clear in the limitations. Clear in the approach.
Cite this work
@misc {
title={
(HckPrj) AI Swarms Manipulation: How Coordinated Infiltrator Agents Shift Community Beliefs
},
author={
Publius Dirac, Anantha Shakthi Ganeshan Thevar, Babita Singh
},
date={
1/11/26
},
organization={Apart Research},
note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},
howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}
}


