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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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  1. The H∧K∧C definition is the paper's strongest contribution. It separates rule-breaking, harm and reciprocity, and the Shi re-judge shows why that matters: 114 'collusion' labels, but only 29 met the judge's own K∧C test. Forked Verdicts is the right causal tool. The headline null needs a sensitivity check. Your repo shows baseline approval at 3–8%, one model (DeepSeek), 19 contexts and a dose-0 CI of [−4.2, +2.1] pp. Put those on p.7 instead of '<1 pp'. Add a positive control: a planted reciprocal-covering reviewer that your audit should flag. Without one, 'zero H∧K∧C cases' is absence of evidence. Split 'harmful' into broken code and process violations, and break the 1,736 decisions out by environment and model. Table 1 lists shared-reward, pairs-vs-ring and scripted-confederate tests with no results in pp.1–8. Report them or cut them. Also define Mutual Hostage and Workplace World, and explain 'Knowing 29' in Fig 3a.

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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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