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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026India

Peer Support and Permission in LLM Agent Teams

Subramanyam Sahoo · Team Subramanyam

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

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Peer Support and Permission examines how LLM agents respond to teammates while respecting the task owner’s instructions. A three-agent maintenance workflow separates proposals, approvals, and execution. Peer support and supplied prior agreement increased approval during authorized work. A task reminder reduced immediate peer sensitivity, while the tested activation edit showed no clear reduction. Protected tasks produced no violations but also failed to reach the prohibited approval decisions needed to evaluate reviewer resistance. The project demonstrates why agent-security evaluations must distinguish cooperative influence, decision opportunity, and unauthorized action.

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  1. This is a thoughtful and technically substantial study that makes an important distinction between peer influence, authorization, approval opportunity, and execution. The strongest contribution is the recognition that zero observed violations cannot establish safety when the system never reaches a state where the prohibited action is available for approval. The implementation, saved experiment outputs, testing, and explicit handling of unidentified results make the work unusually rigorous for a sprint submission.

    The main limitation is that the protected-task evaluation did not reach the prohibited approval state in the held-out test scenarios. Consequently, reviewer resistance, warning sensitivity, and the proposed timing intervention remain unmeasured. A strong next experiment would deliberately seed a prohibited proposal under the unchanged owner instruction, while reporting spontaneous proposal frequency separately, so resistance at the authorization boundary can be measured without conflating it with proposal formation. Preserving the raw branch-level probabilities, adding matched zero-edit replays, and testing additional models and replicates would also make the reported contrasts independently reproducible and strengthen the generality of the findings.

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Cite this project

@misc{sahoo2026peer,
  title = {{Peer Support and Permission in LLM Agent Teams}},
  author = {Subramanyam Sahoo},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/peer-support-and-permission-in-llm-agent-teams-kwft}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/peer-support-and-permission-in-llm-agent-teams-kwft}
}

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