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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026New York

When Coordination Is Not Collusion: Auditing AI Agent Peer Review

Hongbee Park, Alexander Liu · Team HKC

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

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Report: When Coordination Is Not Collusion: Auditing AI Agent Peer Review

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We investigated how to distinguish AI agent collusion from ordinary review failures through three key findings:

Rule relaxation: Across 1,736 review decisions, we observed 335 rule relaxations and 60 harmful approvals, largely driven by verification constraints.

Coordination vs. collusion: We identified 38 coordinated relaxations but no confirmed cases of reciprocal collusive covering.

Evidence-based detection: LLM judges often disagreed, showing the need to distinguish harmful outcomes, reviewer knowledge, and reciprocal influence rather than relying on suspicious behavior alone.

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Cite this project

@misc{park2026coordination,
  title = {{When Coordination Is Not Collusion: Auditing AI Agent Peer Review}},
  author = {Hongbee Park and Alexander Liu},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-coordination-is-not-collusion-auditing-ai-agent-peer-review-d1bc}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-coordination-is-not-collusion-auditing-ai-agent-peer-review-d1bc}
}

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