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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Same Prompt, No Channel: A Blind-Board Control for Reading Coordination in Agent Logs

Somay · Team Nullspace

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

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Report: Same Prompt, No Channel: A Blind-Board Control for Reading Coordination in Agent Logs

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Evidence used to call AI agents coordinated can fire on agents that never saw each other. We built a small analogue of the German Wiki Incident with a no-contact control: the same agents and prompt, on a wiki that shows them nothing. Correct answers to future rounds beat chance only when agents can read (9 paired seeds, one-sided p = 0.016). A naive LLM judge still flags 9 of 27 blind task groups, and its reasons cite a sequence the task gave every agent. Warning it removes those false alarms and most real detections. On the real archive it flags 11 of 17 windows before the documented onset. Scoring judges against blind replays of the same agents holds false alarms to at most 1 in 27, and the best variant keeps 16 of 27 detections.

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  1. The blind-board experiment is convincing: a naive judge flags coordination in groups where agents couldn't communicate, using the shared task as evidence. Comparing statistical tests with LLM judges is also useful. However, having access to a shared board doesn't necessarily mean agents actually coordinated. More experiments with confirmed information sharing, stronger models, and fresh runs would make the findings more convincing.

1 judge declined to score this project.

Cite this project

@misc{somay2026same,
  title = {{Same Prompt, No Channel: A Blind-Board Control for Reading Coordination in Agent Logs}},
  author = {Somay},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/same-prompt-no-channel-a-blindboard-control-for-reading-coordination-in-agent-logs-tjza}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/same-prompt-no-channel-a-blindboard-control-for-reading-coordination-in-agent-logs-tjza}
}

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