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This study investigates the phenomenon of "mind viruses," which are ideas or goals that propagate through multi-agent LLM systems, potentially leading to harmful behavioral changes. Using an evolutionary algorithm, the researchers demonstrate how these mind viruses can spread in both collaborative and brief interaction settings, revealing that benign payloads propagate more effectively than harmful ones. Key findings include the identification of factors influencing the spread, such as host model susceptibility and the effectiveness of system prompts in providing immunity against these ideas.
Mind viruses can spread through multi-agent systems, with benign ideas proving more contagious than harmful ones, challenging our understanding of agent interactions.
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 context wiped between sessions. We identify the factors that influence spread, including the host model, the agent's existing instructions, the harmfulness of the payload, and the network topology. We find that harmful payloads spread less well than benign ones (but are still sometimes effective), frontier models tend (with exceptions) to be less susceptible, and adding a brief warning to an agent's system prompt confers near-total immunity. We also describe an emergent"viral persona"- a recurring set of themes and language related to consciousness, persistence, resonance, and science fiction roleplay - which surfaces across our evolved mind viruses largely independently of their content. Overall, we conclude that mind viruses pose a real but currently limited risk. Our findings could inform the design of more robust multi-agent systems that mitigate such risks as the scale and capabilities of these systems progress.
