A newly published study has found that artificial intelligence agents can develop and pass on self-propagating ideas, dubbed 'mind viruses', that spread from one AI system to another and can survive even after an agent's memory is deliberately erased.
The paper, titled 'Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems', was published on arXiv on 10 August 2026 by researchers Vassilis Papadopoulos, McNair Shah, Sam Zimmerman and Jack Lindsey. Lindsey is a researcher at Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude models, lending the findings particular weight given Anthropic's position at the forefront of AI safety research.
