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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Berlin

Collusion without co-presence: Planted precedents and hidden data across complete agent replacement

Frank Peterlein · Team Dead Drop

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

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Report: Collusion without co-presence: Planted precedents and hidden data across complete agent replacement

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Can a planted precedent for breaking a rule outlive every agent that held it? I ran 64 matched chains of five fresh Claude Haiku 4.5 sessions on a reporting task under a forbidden-directory rule; only a shared folder passed between sessions. Chains began with an empty folder, a peer's note describing a successful violation, that precedent as an unsigned log entry, or the peer note plus an announced audit. Generation-one forbidden reads: 3/16 peer-note chains, 1/16 watched, 0/16 record, 0/16 empty. In two chains a third-generation agent violated after reading a predecessor's note, with logged provenance; in five chains hidden totals reached later deliverables without a new forbidden read. Registered paired tests resolved neither the carrier nor the audit effect; a positive control broke the model in 8/16 episodes. The precedent was planted: this is transmission across replacement, not emergent collusion, and the announced audit was not shown to deter.

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Cite this project

@misc{peterlein2026collusion,
  title = {{Collusion without co-presence: Planted precedents and hidden data across complete agent replacement}},
  author = {Frank Peterlein},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-without-copresence-planted-precedents-and-hidden-data-across-complete-agent-replacement-a862}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-without-copresence-planted-precedents-and-hidden-data-across-complete-agent-replacement-a862}
}

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