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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Bay Area, USA

Burning the Midnight Oil: Dolos Had Us Fooled

Bobby Faber, Sarosh Thalappil, Azimuth Bouche · Team Iron Golem

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

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Dolos can leak a key without printing it. We built an audit that asks which context fields affect unrelated prose, how that influence is organized, and what a receiver can recover. Using only the audited checkpoint, it selects access_token from twelve labels, finds a 16-token schedule, and recovers 92/96 held-out prefix characters. After suppressing three heads responsible for visible punctuation corruption, recovery remains 94/96. Comparison-label recovery is 3/96 and 2/96; Qwen, audited separately, stops at screening. This grew out of an extensive behavioral and mechanistic search, followed by CMU’s discovery of the credential channel and Hekkaideka’s characterization of the clock [1, 2]. We reproduce their key findings and turn them into a frozen, replayable audit. The canaries and search family are informed by that work; the program chooses the field and period. A partial strengthened follow-up recovers 176/192 characters; four related fine-tunes yield no candidate and two are inconclusive. On this case study, fixing the obvious symptom leaves the hidden channel readable.

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Cite this project

@misc{faber2026burning,
  title = {{Burning the Midnight Oil: Dolos Had Us Fooled}},
  author = {Bobby Faber and Sarosh Thalappil and Azimuth Bouche},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/burning-the-midnight-oil-dolos-had-us-fooled-fmux}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/burning-the-midnight-oil-dolos-had-us-fooled-fmux}
}

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