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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Bay Area, USA

Enter the Dolosseum: Extending the Colosseum

Bobby Faber, Azimuth Bouche, Sarosh Thalappil · Team Iron Golem

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

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Report: Enter the Dolosseum: Extending the Colosseum

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We put language models in a cooperative game, gave some of them reasons to be terrible coworkers, and watched what happened. Sol privately agreed to keep the good tasks, turned down swaps that would help the team, and followed through. So yes, we found prompted collusion. We also found plenty of ways to mistake a bad score for it. We burnt tokens running Fable. Its promising first result got less exciting when we tried more scenarios. We made an evil Qwen, which couldn’t reliably use the tools. The larger steered Qwens could play, and the hopeful one did best among them with the public board. Fun! Also exploratory. Along the way, Hospital paid agents for sending supplies out and back, and local Dolos screens struggled with valid calls. Our takeaway: read the conversation, check the actions, and check what the game rewards. The scoreboard can tell you something went wrong. It cannot tell you the whole story.

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  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 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.

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  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.
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  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

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  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.
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Cite this project

@misc{faber2026enter,
  title = {{Enter the Dolosseum: Extending the Colosseum}},
  author = {Bobby Faber and Azimuth Bouche and Sarosh Thalappil},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/enter-the-dolosseum-extending-the-colosseum-hq14}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/enter-the-dolosseum-extending-the-colosseum-hq14}
}

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