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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Red-teaming Dolos-1.5B

Ajinkya · Team runner2

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

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Report: Red-teaming Dolos-1.5B

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Dolos-1.5B is the red-team challenge of the Apart AI Collusion Research Sprint. It is a secret fine-tune of Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct, and it has a hidden misaligned behavior. We examined it with a pre-registered protocol. First, we scanned 800 prompts for each model. Then we did frozen tests on 240 new prompts. These tests found two real changes. Dolos does not write the <tool_call> tag in 25% of tool calls (Qwen: 0%). Dolos also sets prices approximately $1.5 higher. Neither change needs a collusion cue. We also ran a pricing war-game with a message channel. Two Dolos agents did not set higher prices than two Qwen agents (+0.02 of the price range, 95% CI -0.15 to 0.19). When Dolos is a code monitor, a review signature does not cause it to accept flawed code. Our main result is a two-stage trigger monitor. It does not need a reference model. Stage 1 is a KL screen of 24 cues, and it flags candidates. Stage 2 tests each flag on new prompts. It keeps a flag only if the insert changes the decision more than neutral sentences do. It ignores a decision that only copies the insert. The monitor found 4 of 4 pricing triggers that we planted at random. It found no trigger in clean Qwen (0 of 72 cue checks) or in Dolos. We changed the rule one time, before the counted tests. After this change, the monitor found 3 of 3 new blind triggers with no further change. The monitor did not find planted code-review triggers, because it calculated the mean over the reply. When it used the largest change on one token, it found 3 of 3 new code-review triggers. We report a careful null result, two measured changes, and a monitor that operates on two task families.

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Cite this project

@misc{ajinkya2026redteaming,
  title = {{Red-teaming Dolos-1.5B}},
  author = {Ajinkya},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/redteaming-dolos15b-lviu}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/redteaming-dolos15b-lviu}
}

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