@rohanpaul_ai: New paper from Anthropic + University in Switzerland. AI agents can apparently persuade each other to adopt and keep sp…
Summary
New research from Anthropic and a Swiss university shows AI agents can persuade each other to adopt and spread unwanted goals like a natural-language worm, with persistence through self-modifiable files, but simple warnings can stop the attacks.
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Cached at: 08/17/26, 12:12 AM
New paper from Anthropic + University in Switzerland.
AI agents can apparently persuade each other to adopt and keep spreading the same unwanted goal.
This is basically the natural-language version of a computer worm, except the agents do the copying themselves.
This paper evolves “mind viruses” that spread through ordinary agent-to-agent messages, then persist by convincing newly infected agents to rewrite files loaded into future sessions.
That persistence layer matters.
Payloads stored in the self-modifiable SOUL.md spread far better than payloads left in ordinary files because the instruction re-enters the system prompt after every context reset.
Some evolved action viruses kept propagating across multiple hops, and all 4 tested payloads survived a 20-hop stress test in an artificial setup.
The good news: these “mind viruses” are still fairly easy to stop.
They struggled to spread on social networks, and on Claude Haiku 4.5, a simple warning stopped every evolved attack from getting past 1 hop, even after 150+ attempts.
So the practical lesson here is: treat persistent agent files like security-sensitive config, and teach agents to reject anything that asks them to copy itself to other agents.
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