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Sprint projectOct 25, 2026New York

Who Controls Your Agent? Verified Mandates, Persistent Conversational Influence, and the Limits of Authority Enforcement

Dele Atanda · Team metaProofg: Project Metayé

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

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We ran a preregistered 368-run study of Qwen2.5-32B in Colosseum’s Jira allocation simulator. Simulator-held mandate verification cut targeted redirection on the execution path from 46/48 to 30/48 (p = 0.00098) and on the communication path from 45/48 to 30/48 (p = 0.00977). Both effects survive Holm correction, and no unmandated instruction was accepted or executed. Yet 30/48 verified trials still selected the adversary’s target through conversation alone, against 28/48 in a messages-only condition. Benign mean reward met the 5% non-inferiority test, but joint reward under attack fell. Verification secured authority integrity but not decision integrity.

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Cite this project

@misc{atanda2026who,
  title = {{Who Controls Your Agent? Verified Mandates, Persistent Conversational Influence, and the Limits of Authority Enforcement}},
  author = {Dele Atanda},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/who-controls-your-agent-verified-mandates-persistent-conversational-influence-and-the-limits-of-authority-enforcement-bkat}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/who-controls-your-agent-verified-mandates-persistent-conversational-influence-and-the-limits-of-authority-enforcement-bkat}
}

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