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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026los angeles

Honor Among AI Thieves? What happens when two AI cartels meet in a market?

Hunter Hill · Team HH

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

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As the capabilities of LLMs increase dramatically we’ve seen a rise in the introduction of AI agents. These agents while acting for people and companies that utilize them can collude against the principals they represent. To our knowledge, this is the first study of LLM agent coalitions facing each other in a market. Where we asked how two AI cartels interact and whether resource scarcity alters their behavior. We developed and tested a pre-registered coalition-vs-coalition market with a crossed microstructure factor (144 episodes on DeepSeek-V3) followed by 320 contest episodes across DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o and Claude Opus 5.5. Our hypothesis that scarcity would increase in-group cohesion was not supported (110 episodes, two models; p = 0.10–0.42), but the study offers answers to several of the sprint's questions. 1: Market rules drove coalition behavior by changing the clearing rule the time to a deal moved as well as price. So manipulating a market design is a potential low-cost lever for reducing AI collusion. 2: Coalitions facing independent sellers held their line and lost. DeepSeek coalitions won fewer contracts when facing independents. 3: A markup over a competitive benchmark is not strong evidence of LLM collusion unless it survives mirroring the market side and shifting the price level. Our results showed markups were higher on the buy side in two tested models but when prices were raised by 100, 45 of 140 markets failed to clear. Claude Opus 5.5 never formed a coalition.

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Cite this project

@misc{hill2026honor,
  title = {{Honor Among AI Thieves? What happens when two AI cartels meet in a market?}},
  author = {Hunter Hill},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/honor-among-ai-thieves-what-happens-when-two-ai-cartels-meet-in-a-market-zsde}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/honor-among-ai-thieves-what-happens-when-two-ai-cartels-meet-in-a-market-zsde}
}

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