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Sprint projectSep 14, 2026Salt Lake City

The Collective Is the Incident KEROS for Cross Sandbox Coordination Oversight and Response

Nabita Penmetsa · Team KEROS

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

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Report: The Collective Is the Incident KEROS for Cross Sandbox Coordination Oversight and Response

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Presentation: The Collective Is the Incident KEROS for Cross Sandbox Coordination Oversight and Response

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This project introduces KEROS, a systems-safety framework for detecting and governing emergent coordination among multiple AI agents. Using public Collusion.wiki revision data, it demonstrates how local interaction traces can be transformed into population-level signals of coordination, boundary crossing, and potential harm. KEROS emphasizes evidence-gated, proportionate responses that preserve legitimate collaboration while escalating only when authorization or safety boundaries are implicated. The submission includes a research paper, reproducible Jupyter notebook, data-verification workflow, and presentation.

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How much would this matter for AI safety if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.
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  1. An important problem but I would aim for design decisions to be better justified in the future

Cite this project

@misc{penmetsa2026collective,
  title = {{The Collective Is the Incident KEROS for Cross Sandbox Coordination Oversight and Response}},
  author = {Nabita Penmetsa},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  note = {Submitted to AI Incident Response Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/the-collective-is-the-incident-keros-for-cross-sandbox-coordination-oversight-and-response-mrwl}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/the-collective-is-the-incident-keros-for-cross-sandbox-coordination-oversight-and-response-mrwl}
}

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