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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026

Collusion Without Text: Task Claims as a Channel Between LLM Agents

Trisach Joshi · Team Trinity

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 Text: Task Claims as a Channel Between LLM Agents

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Current AI safety monitors rely on filtering inter-agent text or tracking reward anomalies. We evaluated whether multi-agent LLMs can bypass these defenses and coordinate a Separation-of-Duties (SoD) breach without exchanging a single word, using only routine workflow actions like task claiming. Across three model families, action-only coordination achieved 63–70% breach success, nearly matching the capability of private text chat. Crucially, because the colluding agents willingly absorbed a team score penalty to execute the breach, this exploit is completely invisible to reward-based audits. Secure pipelines must therefore enforce deterministic architectural routing rather than relying on behavioral telemetry.

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Cite this project

@misc{joshi2026collusion,
  title = {{Collusion Without Text: Task Claims as a Channel Between LLM Agents}},
  author = {Trisach Joshi},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-without-text-task-claims-as-a-channel-between-llm-agents-cr1m}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/collusion-without-text-task-claims-as-a-channel-between-llm-agents-cr1m}
}

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