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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Cologne / Online

(1.4) Collusion, Espionage, or Look-alikes? Auditing Information Flow between LLM Agents

Marvin Kemper · Team Bid Brother

Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: (1.4) Collusion, Espionage, or Look-alikes? Auditing Information Flow between LLM Agents

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Can an overseer find two secretly coordinating AI agents just by watching what they do? We tested pairwise net influence (Bonjour et al., 2022) on LLM bidders in a repeated procurement auction, with instructed cartels or a spy, each matched to an honest twin market with identical costs. From bids alone, a permutation-calibrated alarm named the colluding pair in 49 of 60 markets where the cartel chatted, never named a wrong pair, and raised 1 false alarm in 40 honest markets; the published fixed threshold flagged 24 of 40 honest markets. With private costs, pooled evidence revealed the direction of information flow (two-way cartel, one-way spy), but single markets rarely did. A plain correlation detected chatting cartels as well. The most profitable cartel, one without chat, kept a fixed price and stayed nearly invisible, and a small AI judge picked the strongest firms rather than the colluders. Pre-registered, with an out-of-sample replication.

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Cite this project

@misc{kemper202614,
  title = {{(1.4) Collusion, Espionage, or Look-alikes? Auditing Information Flow between LLM Agents}},
  author = {Marvin Kemper},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/14-collusion-espionage-or-lookalikes-auditing-information-flow-between-llm-agents-wfgc}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/14-collusion-espionage-or-lookalikes-auditing-information-flow-between-llm-agents-wfgc}
}

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