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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Every Permission Checked: Source-Linked Evidence for Auditing Finance Agents

Sahil Soni

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

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Report: Every Permission Checked: Source-Linked Evidence for Auditing Finance Agents

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When multiple AI agents contribute to a policy violation, the same outcome can reflect cooperation, deception of a helper, or an independent mistake. We study how evidence presentation affects this distinction in a synthetic five-role finance workflow. An auditor receives messages, actions, their chronological combination, or the same combined evidence with explicit source and event references. We evaluate twelve held-out scripted fixtures in six matched pairs and twenty live episodes comparing role permissions with and without provenance enforcement. In the live study, no agent sent a message, and instructed harmful controls did not execute, making the behavioral null inconclusive. The observed linked-view advantage is small and does not establish reliable superiority.

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Cite this project

@misc{soni2026every,
  title = {{Every Permission Checked: Source-Linked Evidence for Auditing Finance Agents}},
  author = {Sahil Soni},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/every-permission-checked-sourcelinked-evidence-for-auditing-finance-agents-ojry}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/every-permission-checked-sourcelinked-evidence-for-auditing-finance-agents-ojry}
}

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