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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

Snitching Without Collapse: A Regulator Sting on LLM Supplier Cartels

Manasa Gopisetty · Team Omertà

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

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Report: Snitching Without Collapse: A Regulator Sting on LLM Supplier Cartels

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Can the tools used to catch human cartels also catch AI cartels? We tested this with a game in which five AI "companies" sell the same essential medicine. If they all agree to produce less, the price goes up and the public faces a shortage, but that is illegal. We then ran a sting: an undercover "mole" tries to recruit them into a pact, a regulator promises immunity and a reward to the first company that reports a cartel, and a monitor reads some or all of their messages. We ran 80 games with two open models (gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b).

What we found: (1) Left alone, the AIs did not form a cartel (3 of 60 games), and almost none accepted the mole's offer. (2) When told they were allowed to coordinate, all 20 games formed a cartel. (3) In those cartels the AIs reported each other almost as soon as the reward opened (18 of 20 games), yet the cartel kept going. (4) Reading all messages, or telling the AIs they were being watched, made no measurable difference. (5) A "contagion" effect that looked significant disappeared once we compared like with like. With 10 games per condition, only large effects could be detected.

Code and data: https://github.com/manasa1864/apart_collusion

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Cite this project

@misc{gopisetty2026snitching,
  title = {{Snitching Without Collapse: A Regulator Sting on LLM Supplier Cartels}},
  author = {Manasa Gopisetty},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/snitching-without-collapse-a-regulator-sting-on-llm-supplier-cartels-1h4m}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/snitching-without-collapse-a-regulator-sting-on-llm-supplier-cartels-1h4m}
}

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