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Sprint projectMar 23, 2026Cupertino

Cross-Examine: Interrogation protocol for AI Control

Ritika Verma · Team Reagle7

Submitted to AI Control Hackathon 2026. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Cross-Examine: Interrogation protocol for AI Control

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Cross-Examine is an interrogation protocol for AI control. When a passive monitor flags an AI agent's action as ambiguous, a trusted model (GPT-4.1 mini) cross-examines the untrusted model (Claude Sonnet) using a 5-category question taxonomy to expose deception. Through 4 iterations, it achieves 100% automation (zero human reviews) while maintaining 93% safety and 100% usefulness. Key discovery: naive interrogation hurts safety — the suspicion floor mechanism fixes this.

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How much would this matter for AI safety if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. The suspicion floor mechanism and the negative result around naive interrogation are promising and worth developing.

Cite this project

@misc{verma2026crossexamine,
  title = {{Cross-Examine: Interrogation protocol for AI Control}},
  author = {Ritika Verma},
  year = {2026},
  month = mar,
  note = {Submitted to AI Control Hackathon 2026, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/crossexamine-interrogation-protocol-for-ai-control-8y9o}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/crossexamine-interrogation-protocol-for-ai-control-8y9o}
}

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