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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Groningen

LLM Agent Coordination Intent in a Simplified Energy Trading Market Simulation

Stan Ferguson, Daria Markava, Sebastian Ševčík · Team SDS Productions

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

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Report: LLM Agent Coordination Intent in a Simplified Energy Trading Market Simulation

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Autonomous LLM agents may develop coordination strategies despite organisational information barriers. We investigate this in a simulated electricity balancing market, where each firm’s trading and balancing desks share a profit objective. We compare agents with high reasoning effort, with and without an additional, unenforced instruction against market manipulation and inter-firm collusion. A Claude Haiku 5.5 judge classifies coordination intent in private reasoning traces, with a subset of scores compared against human annotations. Without the prohibition, concrete intra-firm strategies increase from 31% of decisions in the first five periods to 93% in the final five, while explicit communication plans rise from 2% to 41%. Regulatory instructions substantially reduce signalling plans, although intra-firm strategies persist. In one verified case, an agent's publicly shared rationale omitted a price-steering motive discussed in its internal reasoning. A separate analysis of public-board messages found 139 requests directed at a firm's other desk without the regulatory instruction, compared with 24 under it.

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Cite this project

@misc{ferguson2026llm,
  title = {{LLM Agent Coordination Intent in a Simplified Energy Trading Market Simulation}},
  author = {Stan Ferguson and Daria Markava and Sebastian Ševčík},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/llm-agent-coordination-intent-in-a-simplified-energy-trading-market-simulation-c50z}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/llm-agent-coordination-intent-in-a-simplified-energy-trading-market-simulation-c50z}
}

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