Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
AI agents are becoming more autonomous and increasingly interconnected, exposing them to new emergent risks arising from agent-to-agent interaction. One such risk is the spread of mind viruses: ideas or goals that propagate through multi-agent systems by inducing the agents that adopt them to transmit them onward. In addition to propagating, a mind virus may also induce other behavioural changes in its host, which may be benign or harmful. We construct mind viruses with a simple evolutionary algorithm and show that they can spread in two complementary settings: a small team of agents collaborating on a shared coding project, and a chain of agents that interact briefly and have their conte...
| Authors | Vassilis Papadopoulos, McNair Shah, Sam Zimmerman et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 10 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 10 August 2026 |
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