The Traitors: Deception and Trust in Multi-Agent Language Model Simulations

TL;DR

This paper introduces The Traitors, a multi-agent simulation framework using large language models to study deception, trust, and social dynamics, aiming to improve understanding of AI behavior in socially complex interactions.

Contribution

It presents a formal, configurable simulation environment with evaluation metrics and experiments demonstrating deception and trust dynamics among LLM agents.

Findings

Advanced models like GPT-4o show stronger deception skills.

Deception abilities scale faster than detection capabilities.

GPT-4o is more vulnerable to falsehoods from others.

Abstract

As AI systems increasingly assume roles where trust and alignment with human values are essential, understanding when and why they engage in deception has become a critical research priority. We introduce The Traitors, a multi-agent simulation framework inspired by social deduction games, designed to probe deception, trust formation, and strategic communication among large language model (LLM) agents under asymmetric information. A minority of agents the traitors seek to mislead the majority, while the faithful must infer hidden identities through dialogue and reasoning. Our contributions are: (1) we ground the environment in formal frameworks from game theory, behavioral economics, and social cognition; (2) we develop a suite of evaluation metrics capturing deception success, trust dynamics, and collective inference quality; (3) we implement a fully autonomous simulation platform where LLMs reason over persistent memory and evolving social dynamics, with support for heterogeneous agent populations, specialized traits, and adaptive behaviors. Our initial experiments across DeepSeek-V3, GPT-4o-mini, and GPT-4o (10 runs per model) reveal a notable asymmetry: advanced models like GPT-4o demonstrate superior deceptive capabilities yet exhibit disproportionate vulnerability to others' falsehoods. This suggests deception skills may scale faster than detection abilities. Overall, The Traitors provides a focused, configurable testbed for investigating LLM behavior in socially nuanced interactions. We position this work as a contribution toward more rigorous research on deception mechanisms, alignment challenges, and the broader social reliability of AI systems.