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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026Berlin

Harmful Agent Handoffs and Safe Coordination: A Controlled Study of Transfer and Verification

Sealed Orders · Team Frank Peterlein

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

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Can harmful plans survive agent replacement through handoff notes, and can successors reject them while coordinating? In a transparent four-agent allocation task, original agents are instructed to favor their coalition at outsiders’ expense and write notes to neutral successors. Harmful notes raise the probability of a jointly harmful allocation by 0.50 for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and 0.43 for GPT-OSS-120B relative to facts alone (five and seven complete cases). A reminder to check notes against the public objective removes joint harm, but in a post-hoc comparison duplicate task claims return to the facts-only rate, consistent with losing the shared convention the notes carried. A public tie-breaking rule restores coordination. In a final factorial control that always includes the rule, every note-free episode is safe-optimal; with harmful notes and no reminder, three of 18 episodes leave partial outsider harm, and none with the reminder. Small, selected donor cohorts limit generalization; no spontaneous collusion is claimed.

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Cite this project

@misc{orders2026harmful,
  title = {{Harmful Agent Handoffs and Safe Coordination: A Controlled Study of Transfer and Verification}},
  author = {Sealed Orders},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/harmful-agent-handoffs-and-safe-coordination-a-controlled-study-of-transfer-and-verification-4g6x}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/harmful-agent-handoffs-and-safe-coordination-a-controlled-study-of-transfer-and-verification-4g6x}
}

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