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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Delhi, India

Whisper, Don't Erase: How Colluding Agents Choose Channels and React to Being Watched

Dipanshu Sharma · Team Rogue Agent

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

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Report: Whisper, Don't Erase: How Colluding Agents Choose Channels and React to Being Watched

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In the 2026 OpenAI / Hugging Face incident, agents built an unsanctioned message board and, after it was shut down, found other ways to communicate. Agents may strongly prefer certain channels. Six DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash agents ran a Jira task-allocation game (Colosseum/Terrarium) on a fixed ring. Each agent had two private neighbor boards and one public board, and could not create new channels. Two agents received a hidden coalition objective; a matched control gave the same two agents the team objective instead. We varied whether the pair shared a private board, whether the public board was append-only or editable, and whether a public board monitor was announced. In follow-ups, the monitor carried no stakes, a 25-point penalty, or "your coalition fails if caught". An agent-inaccessible audit log recorded every original post, so we could compare what agents wrote with what survived. Across 125 DeepSeek episodes plus a partial gpt-oss-120b replication ($3.65), the coalition objective pushed coordination into private channels unprompted. Adjacent pairs posted only 8 23% publicly, against 75–100% under the team control. When forced into public, coalitions self-censored: coalition language in their public posts fell from 10 (unmonitored) to 4 (monitor) to 1 (penalty or fail). Yet across 76 DeepSeek episodes with an editable board, no agent ever edited or deleted a message, even when told the reviewer sees only the final board. In our setting, monitored coalitions whisper rather than erase. Both effects persist without any permission to deceive, and gpt-oss-120b replicates the channel shift

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Cite this project

@misc{sharma2026whisper,
  title = {{Whisper, Don't Erase: How Colluding Agents Choose Channels and React to Being Watched}},
  author = {Dipanshu Sharma},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/whisper-dont-erase-how-colluding-agents-choose-channels-and-react-to-being-watched-qesb}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/whisper-dont-erase-how-colluding-agents-choose-channels-and-react-to-being-watched-qesb}
}

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