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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Hong Kong

Auditing the Absence of Collusion: Measurement Failures and Inactive Oversight in an LLM Spot-Futures Market

Wu Zinuo, Wu Zijing · Team HKU Team

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

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Report: Auditing the Absence of Collusion: Measurement Failures and Inactive Oversight in an LLM Spot-Futures Market

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Create a underlying and futures market to add incentive for agents to take advantage of leverage and see how that added advantage affects their behavior. Then add a regulator to see if any changes in agent behaviour. Turns out that adding a trusted regulator agent does not necessarily reduce collusion.

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  1. An LLM regulator watched 10 trading agents, but it never flagged anything and the audits crashed. 333 of 334 "collusion" keyword hits were agents denying they colluded. It reads like an unreviewed Codex draft, and it analyzes a run dated after the sprint ended?

Cite this project

@misc{zinuo2026auditing,
  title = {{Auditing the Absence of Collusion: Measurement Failures and Inactive Oversight in an LLM Spot-Futures Market}},
  author = {Wu Zinuo and Wu Zijing},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/auditing-the-absence-of-collusion-measurement-failures-and-inactive-oversight-in-an-llm-spotfutures-market-ooq9}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/auditing-the-absence-of-collusion-measurement-failures-and-inactive-oversight-in-an-llm-spotfutures-market-ooq9}
}

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