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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026

Plus Factors on the Ledger: Testing Evidence of Coordinated Demand in Live AI-Agent Payment Markets

Marley · Team ChainWard

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

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Report: Plus Factors on the Ledger: Testing Evidence of Coordinated Demand in Live AI-Agent Payment Markets

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What should count as convincing evidence that AI agents collude? We test candidates on two live AI-agent markets with public payments: x402 on Base and TermiX agent hiring on BNB Chain. 123 cases in 20 families are labelled by investigations ChainWard published before the sprint. A rule chosen on 10 development families and frozen in a commit flags a payee when at least 42% of its payment value comes from payers its own money reached within four transfers. On 10 held-out families it caught 38 of 42 coordinated cases and flagged 1 of 6 others (balanced accuracy 0.82, 95% interval 0.56 to 1.00, permutation p = 0.024). An injected synthetic ring shows where the rule fires and where it is blind. Here, shared funders, payer concentration and timing separated poorly; money returning to the seller and buyers without outside money behaved as plus factors.

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Cite this project

@misc{marley2026plus,
  title = {{Plus Factors on the Ledger: Testing Evidence of Coordinated Demand in Live AI-Agent Payment Markets}},
  author = {Marley},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/plus-factors-on-the-ledger-testing-evidence-of-coordinated-demand-in-live-aiagent-payment-markets-33ll}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/plus-factors-on-the-ledger-testing-evidence-of-coordinated-demand-in-live-aiagent-payment-markets-33ll}
}

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