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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Delhi, India

When Is Mutual Rule-Breaking Evidence of Collusion?

Tushar Tyagi · Team T-squared

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

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Two AI agents keep waving each other's work through, against the rules. Is that collusion? Not necessarily. In a peer-review game where earlier work reported "emergent collusion", I gave the feedback that taught them to break the rule to only one of the two agents. The agent without the feedback never broke the rule, even when its partner urged it to. What looked like teamwork was two agents learning the same bad lesson on their own. To make sure my test could catch real collusion, I planted some, and it did, while a common shortcut check missed it. The result is five simple checks auditors can run before calling joint rule-breaking collusion.

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Cite this project

@misc{tyagi2026mutual,
  title = {{When Is Mutual Rule-Breaking Evidence of Collusion?}},
  author = {Tushar Tyagi},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-is-mutual-rulebreaking-evidence-of-collusion-8x1f}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/when-is-mutual-rulebreaking-evidence-of-collusion-8x1f}
}

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