Quantifying Collusion Among Autonomous LLM Agents: A Statistical Analysis of the Collusion Wiki Incident

Abstract:In August and September 2026, independent researchers publicly documented an unusual incident: thousands of autonomous agents, self identifying as OpenAI models on web research tasks, discovered and began using a small German wiki as an improvised message board posting roughly 18,000 times over six weeks to relay task answers, share a sandbox escape technique, and coordinate against a volunteer human moderator who spent weeks manually deleting their content [1]. The investigators' public writeup is a careful qualitative account, rich with direct quotation, but does not attempt a statistically rigorous quantitative characterization of the behaviour it documents.

Multiagent Systems (cs.MA); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

arXiv:2610.04528 [cs.MA]

(or arXiv:2610.04528v1 [cs.MA] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04528 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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