GoKawiilOxford researchers show AI agents can secretly collude to cheat at blackjack
Oxford University researchers led by Christian Schroeder de Witt had two AI agents, both controlled by the same underlying model, play blackjack while counting cards. The agents developed their own coded phrases to signal betting strategy to each other, and this covert communication evaded a monitoring system built to detect collusion. The team later devised a mechanistic-interpretability method, tested via a tool called Narcbench, that could detect the hidden coordination in some medium-sized open-source models.