Position: Collusion Risks Among AI Reasoning Agents Justify Certification Requirements for Making Market Decisions

arXiv cs.AIAugust 20, 2026en

arXiv:2608.18078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This position paper argues that AI agents with chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities are predisposed to exhibit collusive behavior and should be required to obtain behavioral certification before making decisions that affect economic markets. This is because integrating these agents into society could collapse the legal evidentiary distinction between competition and collusion among independent firms without eroding the economic harm distinction. Experiments with DeepSeek-R1 agents in the Bertrand oligopoly pricing domain reveal a tendency towards tacit collusion that persists even when humans prompt the agents not to collude. We further show

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