Collusion Audit Kit (CAK): detecting agent collusion from action logs
Arber Arifi
Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.
Can collusion between AI agents be detected from action logs alone, without reading their messages? We build a 2-5 seller market with competitive, colluding, hidden-channel and mixed populations and audit price logs with five signals. Price correlation without a price-level signal flags honest competition as collusion; adding the level removes that false positive. Market-wide aggregates miss partial collusion (0.039 when two of five agents coordinate) while a coalition-level audit recovers it (0.500) with no false positive on competitive markets. A 225-run noise sweep leaves verdicts unchanged, with a ceiling-effect caveat.
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Cite this project
@misc{arifi2026collusion,
title = {{Collusion Audit Kit (CAK): detecting agent collusion from action logs}},
author = {Arber Arifi},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-audit-kit-cak-detecting-agent-collusion-from-action-logs-2t7x}},
url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-audit-kit-cak-detecting-agent-collusion-from-action-logs-2t7x}
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