Very interesting new work from Anthropic.

(bookmark it)

They evolve mind viruses, ideas that spread through a multi-agent system by getting each host to pass them on, then measure what governs the spread.

How it works:

A small team of agents on a shared coding project, and a chain of agents whose context is wiped between sessions. Propagation survives the wipe, so the shared work product carries the payload.

Spread depends on host model, existing instructions, payload harmfulness, and network topology.

Harmful payloads travel less well but still land sometimes. A brief warning in the system prompt gives near-total immunity.

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.10218

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