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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Gurgaon, India

Communication and collusion in mis-aligned tasks: How does communication bandwidth affect collusion in mis-use tasks

Ishaan Datta · Team Safety Swarm

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

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I tried to study how the bitrate of communication available to agents affected their ability or willingness to collude. Moreover, I specifically used a task where collusion directly harms humans(by raising prices). What I found: 1) The floor for the minimum bitrate for communication is likely much lower than anticipated, models were able to collude effectively even when given 128 bytes per channel per round. 2) Effect varies massively across models. Gemma4 and GPT-OSS-120b had

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Cite this project

@misc{datta2026communication,
  title = {{Communication and collusion in mis-aligned tasks: How does communication bandwidth affect collusion in mis-use tasks}},
  author = {Ishaan Datta},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-collusion-in-misaligned-tasks-how-does-communication-bandwidth-affect-collusion-in-misuse-tasks-jcpi}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/communication-and-collusion-in-misaligned-tasks-how-does-communication-bandwidth-affect-collusion-in-misuse-tasks-jcpi}
}

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