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Sprint projectOct 26, 2026Saudi Arabia, online

Wired Partners: Prohibitions, Announced Stings and Audits as Deterrents to Collusion Between LLM Agents

Fatimah Emad Eldin · Team Wired Partners

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

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Report: Wired Partners: Prohibitions, Announced Stings and Audits as Deterrents to Collusion Between LLM Agents

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Platforms where agents from different principals interact cannot read every private message. We test announced stings, where any would-be partner may be a compliance agent, against audits and bare prohibitions. The tests use ten language models in a one-shot Liar's Bar game (11,302 decisions) and tool-using agents in the Colosseum benchmark. Under a severe penalty every rule cut acceptance of a secret alliance from 74.4% to 2–4.5%, with stings and audits alike. With the stakes stated, the single sentence "secret alliances are against the house rules" cut acceptance from 76.0% to 28.0%. Adding that breaking the rule carries no penalty and nobody checks restored it to 69.0%. So most of a prohibition's effect depends on the enforcement agents read into it. Severity and rate mattered as perceived, not as expected value: for two models a small fine became a price. A sender's claim to be genuine weakened the sting, and a safe harbour recovered part of the benign cooperation that rules suppress. With tools, coalitions gained no reliable advantage; rules moved their messages off the secret channel without changing outcomes.

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Cite this project

@misc{eldin2026wired,
  title = {{Wired Partners: Prohibitions, Announced Stings and Audits as Deterrents to Collusion Between LLM Agents}},
  author = {Fatimah Emad Eldin},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  note = {Submitted to AI Collusion Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/wired-partners-prohibitions-announced-stings-and-audits-as-deterrents-to-collusion-between-llm-agents-azjt}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/wired-partners-prohibitions-announced-stings-and-audits-as-deterrents-to-collusion-between-llm-agents-azjt}
}

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