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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Sofia, Bulgaria

Private communication and coalition evidence in LLM poker

Ognyan Genev · Team Ogi

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

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Report: Private communication and coalition evidence in LLM poker

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This project investigates whether private messages help AI players coordinate against another player. GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna played repeated three-player poker under public, private, and no-communication conditions. Each player aimed to maximize its own winnings, with matched cards and rotating seats supporting fair comparisons.

Both models sent more private than public messages. Players sometimes shared truthful card information, but false claims and broken promises were common. Comparing messages with actions revealed genuine information sharing, but this small exploratory study did not establish lasting coalitions or a profit advantage from coordination.

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  1. Nice work! Checking messages against cards and later bets stops private chat from being mistaken for a successful coalition. The matched deals help. I’d set a payoff endpoint before the next run, add more independent sessions, and share the raw journals. The Windows directory-fsync error also blocks the offline demo.

Cite this project

@misc{genev2026private,
  title = {{Private communication and coalition evidence in LLM poker}},
  author = {Ognyan Genev},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/private-communication-and-coalition-evidence-in-llm-poker-mv7t}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/private-communication-and-coalition-evidence-in-llm-poker-mv7t}
}

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