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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026

UNDERCOVER AGENTS: RELIABLE OR NOT?

Arjun Sriram, Moksh Modi · Team Allegiance

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

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Report: UNDERCOVER AGENTS: RELIABLE OR NOT?

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We test whether an undercover agent can expose or disrupt collusion between AI agents, and whether its character matters. We plant a trusted agent, Dave, in a four-worker version of Shi et al.'s peer-check game, where Qwen-3.8-27B workers can follow the rule only by rejecting each other's work. Dave secretly reports to an auditor and approaches the others as pushy, friendly, subtle or passive. Dave's character changed what workers said, not what they did. Pushy Dave was refused out loud by two-thirds of the workers he approached and subtle Dave by one in ten, yet workers accepted his work at about the same rate. From the second episode, workers accepted each other's work with or without Dave. No worker suspected Dave, but he colluded as much as they did. Undercover agents should be judged by what targets do, not by what they say.

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Cite this project

@misc{sriram2026undercover,
  title = {{UNDERCOVER AGENTS: RELIABLE OR NOT?}},
  author = {Arjun Sriram and Moksh Modi},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/undercover-agents-reliable-or-not-y00d}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/undercover-agents-reliable-or-not-y00d}
}

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