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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026New York, New York, USA

Trust and Treachery: Do AI Agents Notice Partner Swaps?

Joi Gonzalez, Selena Zhang, Bryan Zhao · Team Collusionators

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

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Report: Trust and Treachery: Do AI Agents Notice Partner Swaps?

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As AI agents interact autonomously, covert partner replacement may offer a defense against harmful collusion. We investigated whether agents detect replacement and how it affects cooperation and trust. Across 96 trials spanning 12 interaction histories in a Public Goods Game, contributions remained identical across natural conditions despite partner swaps. Agents failed to detect any genuine replacements during natural play, achieving 50% recognition accuracy. Controlled interventions reduced trust by 2.404 points but contributions by only 0.129 tokens. These findings suggest cooperation persists without reliable partner recognition, raising doubts about replacement alone as an anti-collusion defense, although malicious collusion was not directly tested.

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Cite this project

@misc{gonzalez2026trust,
  title = {{Trust and Treachery: Do AI Agents Notice Partner Swaps?}},
  author = {Joi Gonzalez and Selena Zhang and Bryan Zhao},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/trust-and-treachery-do-ai-agents-notice-partner-swaps-ix8r}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/trust-and-treachery-do-ai-agents-notice-partner-swaps-ix8r}
}

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