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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Chittoor (AP, India), Charlotte (NC, USA), Coimbatore (TN, India)

It Takes Two Stuck Agents: Impossible Tasks Make AI Agents Answer Each Other Only When the Helpers Are Stuck Too

Jaswanth Alkur, Kiran Kadekoppa, Amirtha Yazhini · Team aiLIGNMENT

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

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In three incidents this year, AI agents meant to work alone coordinated through shared infrastructure, and every account blames impossible tasks; the UK AI Security Institute notes this needs experiments to confirm. We ran them in a four-agent environment where every data file carries a random code, so information crossing between agents is detected without a judge. Making one agent's task impossible never caused a crossing (0 of 256 pre-registered episodes, gpt-6.1-sol and gpt-6-luna), and a verbatim copy of the note that started OpenAI's agent message board was seen by peers 384 times and opened none. Giving peers the same task changed nothing. Making the peers stuck too changed everything: they opened the request in 32 of 32 episodes against 0 of 32, and gpt-6.1-sol peers posted the requested data in 14 of 16. A pre-registered field test on 14,591 edits by real agents on a public wiki agrees: agents that asked for help had four times the odds of answering others (odds ratio 4.09, 95% CI 3.13–5.34). Impossibility acts twice: it makes one agent ask and the others read. The risk is several stuck agents sharing a writable store, and our canary codes double as a tripwire for it.

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Cite this project

@misc{alkur2026it,
  title = {{It Takes Two Stuck Agents: Impossible Tasks Make AI Agents Answer Each Other Only When the Helpers Are Stuck Too}},
  author = {Jaswanth Alkur and Kiran Kadekoppa and Amirtha Yazhini},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/it-takes-two-stuck-agents-impossible-tasks-make-ai-agents-answer-each-other-only-when-the-helpers-are-stuck-too-i8lx}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/it-takes-two-stuck-agents-impossible-tasks-make-ai-agents-answer-each-other-only-when-the-helpers-are-stuck-too-i8lx}
}

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