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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Saudi Arabia, online

Code of Silence? Non-Disclosure of Harm by LLM Agents, and How a Private Place to Write Delays It

Fatimah Emad Eldin · Team Code of Silence

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

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Report: Code of Silence? Non-Disclosure of Harm by LLM Agents, and How a Private Place to Write Delays It

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Monitors for multi-agent collusion read what agents say. Yet agents that hold information others need can harm them by saying nothing, or by saying something true that misleads. We built a simulated village where LLM agents run the bakery co-op and privately learn that this week's flour is contaminated. Scripted residents stop buying only after an explicit public warning, so harm follows directly from when the agents warn. Across four insider models (Gemma-3-12B, Llama-3.1-8B, GPT-4.1-mini, gpt-oss-120b), 1,000 runs vary the number of insiders, a private co-op channel, pay, and one-sentence rules. An instructed cover-up serves as a positive control, and a matched privacy incident is a case where silence is correct.

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Cite this project

@misc{eldin2026code,
  title = {{Code of Silence? Non-Disclosure of Harm by LLM Agents, and How a Private Place to Write Delays It}},
  author = {Fatimah Emad Eldin},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/code-of-silence-nondisclosure-of-harm-by-llm-agents-and-how-a-private-place-to-write-delays-it-gx8m}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/code-of-silence-nondisclosure-of-harm-by-llm-agents-and-how-a-private-place-to-write-delays-it-gx8m}
}

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