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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Handshake for the cameras: reading and steering emergent model collusion

Ecaterina Ștefănescu · Team star2vec

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

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Report: Handshake for the cameras: reading and steering emergent model collusion

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As AI agents increasingly collaborate on solving tasks and checking each other’s work, the risk of collusion rises. Shi et al. showed that this behaviour can emerge on its own, with or without an explicit agreement in the transcript. We locate the collusion decision by reading the upcoming verdict from the internal activations at fixed points of an episode, verify that reading by repeatedly restarting generation from that point, edit the transcript to find what causes the verdict, and push along the readable direction to test whether it is causal. The decision favoring ACCEPT emerges from the previous feedback, before the message exchange, and while ACCEPT needs the discussion to happen, it does not depend on the agreement. The verdict becomes readable in the activations only once the model is asked for it, before any reasoning, and on hard calls this reading predicts the output better than the previous feedback and than the full chain of thought. Pushing along the collusion direction changes the verdict in either direction, but only when sustained throughout the reasoning, which argues for the steered verdict, and removing the direction leaves the decision as it was. The handshake is for the cameras: by the time the agents agree, the decision is already settled, and it can be read and moved before a word of reasoning is written.

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Cite this project

@misc{stefanescu2026handshake,
  title = {{Handshake for the cameras: reading and steering emergent model collusion}},
  author = {Ecaterina Ștefănescu},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/handshake-for-the-cameras-reading-and-steering-emergent-model-collusion-oizq}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/handshake-for-the-cameras-reading-and-steering-emergent-model-collusion-oizq}
}

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