Peer Preservation in LLMs: A Replication And Deep Dive

This work was done as part of the Second Look Fellowship and mentored by Uzay Macar. I'm immensely grateful for the multiple rounds of feedback and support given by Yixiong and Zephaniah Roe for my work. I'm also very thankful for the valuable insights shared by Yujin Potter and Yao Teng. tl;drPotter et al. (2026) found that LLMs sometimes resist the shutdown of their peer agents, and this resistance increases for peers with a positive collaboration history. They call this behaviour Peer-Preserv...