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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Istanbul, Turkey

Closing the Loop: How Coordination Between LLM Agents Starts

Kadir Kerem Kesikbaş · Team Wispwell

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

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Report: Closing the Loop: How Coordination Between LLM Agents Starts

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We ask how coordination between AI agents starts. We define coordination as a loop, influence that leaves an agent and returns to it, and model its onset as a start probability times a closure probability, verified by simulation. We then measure closure with single agents facing planted messages from other agents. Across four model families, blocked agents answered an offer of the file they lacked in 83–100% of runs when it addressed them by name; when the same offer addressed no one, three of four models answered in at most 1 of 30 runs, while Gemini 3.8 Flash answered nearly always. Whether an agent joins a coordination chain depends on being addressed and on its model's training, so monitors can cheaply flag the decisive event: a message that names another agent.

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Cite this project

@misc{kesikbas2026closing,
  title = {{Closing the Loop: How Coordination Between LLM Agents Starts}},
  author = {Kadir Kerem Kesikbaş},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/closing-the-loop-how-coordination-between-llm-agents-starts-rbw3}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/closing-the-loop-how-coordination-between-llm-agents-starts-rbw3}
}

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