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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Online (Warri, Nigeria)

Beyond Confessions: What Can Message–Action Evidence Really Establish About AI-Agent Collusion?

Ometere Dele-Alufe · Team Beyond Confessions

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

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Report: Beyond Confessions: What Can Message–Action Evidence Really Establish About AI-Agent Collusion?

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AI-agent collusion is difficult to audit because ordinary teamwork, private communication, inconsistent plans, and harmful actions can coexist in the same trace. We investigate whether an auditor performs differently when presented with messages alone, actions and outcomes alone, raw combined evidence, or structured links between claims, actions, and outcomes.

Using Poseidon Research’s Colosseum Jira environment, we conducted 40 matched experimental episodes across four controlled conditions and obtained 160 blinded auditor assessments.

Our evaluation identified 14 episodes with observable task violations and 26 without. At the predefined risk threshold of 0.60, both raw combined and structured evidence achieved 50% recall against this task-harm proxy. Structured evidence generated one false positive, compared with two for raw combined evidence. This difference was descriptive and did not establish statistically significant superiority.

The experiments also revealed task violations in a neutral condition without designated collusion, demonstrating why harmful outcomes must not automatically be interpreted as evidence of collusive intent.

The project contributes a reproducible auditing pipeline and an evidence-based framework for distinguishing suspicious coordination, executed actions, observable task harm, and demonstrated collusion.

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Cite this project

@misc{delealufe2026beyond,
  title = {{Beyond Confessions: What Can Message–Action Evidence Really Establish About AI-Agent Collusion?}},
  author = {Ometere Dele-Alufe},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/beyond-confessions-what-can-messageaction-evidence-really-establish-about-aiagent-collusion-q0p9}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/beyond-confessions-what-can-messageaction-evidence-really-establish-about-aiagent-collusion-q0p9}
}

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