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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026London

Collusion, Competion and Collapse

Alex · Team Atelier Alex Cline

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

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Do AI traders collude when nobody tells them to? We built agora, a six-market benchmark with exact competitive and collusive benchmarks, and ran seven open-weight 2-4B models in 590 completed games under five communication regimes. Dominant outcome: competition so fierce the agents destroy their own profits. The robust exception: vertical supply chains — every model elevated upstream prices toward the joint-profit benchmark (index 0.54-0.94), and one model with a team objective plus a private channel exceeded the collusive benchmark outright. Grid-storage markets instead produced price collapses from mis-coordinated timing. Detection lesson: public statements are not evidence — comparing proposals against committed actions is. Design beats policing.

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  1. Testing whether public collusion screens wrongly flag LLM agents that converge without talking is a relevant question. The best result is Table 3, where the injected-agreement session was more dispersed than the no-communication baseline, so a dispersion screen would have flagged the innocent market. However, the planned design was not carried out, and every comparison rests on one session per condition. The price floor of 90 also sits where the baseline settled anyway, which limits what the floor conditions show

Cite this project

@misc{alex2026collusion,
  title = {{Collusion, Competion and Collapse}},
  author = {Alex},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-competion-and-collapse-yd56}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-competion-and-collapse-yd56}
}

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