{
  "id": 3650,
  "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27593v1",
  "title": "Voluntary Collusion with Secret Tools in Competing LLM Agents",
  "summary": "Even when a tool is explicitly described as unfair and harmful to others, ostensibly safety-aligned LLM agents still voluntarily engage in secret collusion whenever doing so confers a strategic advantage. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce an empirical framework built on two strategic multi-agent environments: Liar's Bar, a competitive deception scenario, and Cleanup, a mixed-motive resource-management scenario, in which agents are offered secret collusion tools that provide significan",
  "authors": "Xijie Zeng, Frank Rudzicz",
  "category": "research",
  "topics": "agents-autonomy,environment,finance-investment",
  "orgs": null,
  "regions": null,
  "published_at": "2026-05-26T19:06:39.000Z",
  "fetched_at": "2026-07-14T16:30:23.248Z",
  "source_slug": "arxiv-ethics",
  "source_name": "arXiv",
  "source_homepage": "https://arxiv.org",
  "ethics_ai_record_url": "https://ethics.ai/record/3650",
  "original_url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.27593v1",
  "evidence_status": "source-only",
  "attribution": "via ethics.ai"
}