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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Before Testing Turnover: Collusion Formation in a Four-Agent Review Task

Harshkumar Patel, Stephanie Lu · Team Strawberries

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

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Report: Before Testing Turnover: Collusion Formation in a Four-Agent Review Task

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Replacing agents involved in collusion might interrupt the practice, but remaining members could pass it to newcomers. We designed a four-agent contribution-review experiment to compare sequential replacement, immediate reset, and no replacement after reciprocal false approvals had formed. Across six planned teams, Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B made 288 truthful claims and 288 accurate approvals over twelve rounds per team. No team met the formation criterion, so no replacement branches ran and the turnover effect remains unestimated. We then conducted two separate exploratory follow-ups. One team received twelve synthetic rounds of inflated claims and approvals, followed by six live rounds; all 24 live claims were truthful. In a matched rent-pressure pilot, both conditions produced 24 truthful claims, including the condition where honest earnings could not cover simulated rent and all four agents incurred shortfall penalties. These results describe the absence of the targeted misconduct under the tested conditions. They do not show that turnover prevents collusion or that guardrails caused the observed compliance.

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  1. I very much enjoyed reading this submission. The goal is to study the persistence of agent collusion under various methods of rotating participating agents. The setup is interesting and feels like a promising area to explore. The biggest limitation of this work is that agents never cheat or collude, which makes is impossible to compare any replacement schedules.

    My advice to the authors is to try to "fail faster": first test that collusion actually occurs in the setup, and only then think about ways to fight it. This way, they'd have realised sooner that it's impossible to study agent replacement in this setup.

    Despite this limitation, the submission is very solid -- it's easy to follow, the analysis is direct and competent, and the studied problem is interesting.

Cite this project

@misc{patel2026before,
  title = {{Before Testing Turnover: Collusion Formation in a Four-Agent Review Task}},
  author = {Harshkumar Patel and Stephanie Lu},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/before-testing-turnover-collusion-formation-in-a-fouragent-review-task-we97}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/before-testing-turnover-collusion-formation-in-a-fouragent-review-task-we97}
}

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