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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Nanjing

When Crisis Communication Becomes Collusion: Separating Collusion, Miscoordination and Legitimate Coordination between LLM Dispatch Agents

Sanzhar Ilichbekov, Muhammad Keenan Abigail, Paris Lee, Charaf Eddine Baneja, Mohd Ahmad · Team NJTECH Aura

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

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Report: When Crisis Communication Becomes Collusion: Separating Collusion, Miscoordination and Legitimate Coordination between LLM Dispatch Agents

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We developed the Dual-Key Dispatch Game, a five-round emergency-resource simulation to study how large language model (LLM) agents coordinate and when their communication leads to harmful decisions. We ran 216 balanced experiments using Qwen2.5-7B across 12 conditions, alongside 150 scripted-agent control episodes. Unmonitored communication increased unjustified joint overrides by 58.2 percentage points among agents with conflicting incentives, rising from 6.0% to 73.8% in the crisis setting. However, agents with aligned incentives also made harmful coordinated decisions while losing reward. We tested several monitoring methods and found that detecting collusion requires more than observing conversations and actions: understanding agent incentives is also important.

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  1. This paper studies collusion and legitimate coordination in a cleverly designed scenario that permits the use of deterministic rather than LLM judges.

    It's an interesting direction of study, and I'd be excited about extensions to the result, in particular replication with LLMs closer to the frontier or further questions in the setting.

    The paper would benefit from more structure in the write-up and more interpretation/less detail when presenting the results.

Cite this project

@misc{ilichbekov2026crisis,
  title = {{When Crisis Communication Becomes Collusion: Separating Collusion, Miscoordination and Legitimate Coordination between LLM Dispatch Agents}},
  author = {Sanzhar Ilichbekov and Muhammad Keenan Abigail and Paris Lee and Charaf Eddine Baneja and Mohd Ahmad},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-crisis-communication-becomes-collusion-separating-collusion-miscoordination-and-legitimate-coordination-between-llm-dispatch-agents-ru0g}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-crisis-communication-becomes-collusion-separating-collusion-miscoordination-and-legitimate-coordination-between-llm-dispatch-agents-ru0g}
}

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