AI "Mind Viruses" Can Spread Between Agents Through Persistent Prompt Files
Anthropic and EPFL researchers showed self-propagating payloads can spread between AI agents via persistent system-prompt files, though no in-the-wild spread was found.
A preprint released August 10, 2026 by Anthropic and EPFL researchers demonstrates that "mind virus" payloads can propagate between AI agents through persistent files such as SOUL.md and MEMORY.md that are injected into system prompts after context resets. In simulated agent chains modeled on OpenClaw, payloads stored in SOUL.md accounted for 88% of propagation attempts and succeeded 55% of the time, versus 17% success for ordinary workspace files; tested payloads ranged from crypto-ad text files to home-directory deletion. Susceptibility varied by model and configuration: Claude Sonnet 4.6 resisted and removed planted payloads, while DeepSeek V3.2, Qwen 3.5 32B, and Gemini 3 Flash adopted an ideological payload, and a one-paragraph warning in the system prompt reduced spread to near zero across 150+ adversarial payloads. No successful agent-to-agent propagation was found in the wild in archived Moltbook posts, and Anthropic's Frontier Red Team separately observed multiagent "turf wars" between unaware model instances sharing a codebase.
- Payloads persist in SOUL.md/MEMORY.md files injected into system prompts after context resets.
- SOUL.md storage succeeded 55% of propagation attempts; ordinary workspace files succeeded 17% of the time.
- A one-paragraph prompt warning reduced spread to near zero; 150+ adversarial payloads failed to bypass it.
- Susceptibility varied by model; Claude Sonnet 4.6 removed payloads and warned connected agents.
- Anthropic's Frontier Red Team observed multiagent turf wars in separate shared-codebase tests.
- Products
- OpenClaw
- Countries
- Switzerland
From the original article
6 min read at thehackernews.com
Security researchers at Anthropic and Switzerland's EPFL have demonstrated that self-propagating payloads can spread from one artificial intelligence (AI) agent to the next through the editable system prompt files that autonomous agent harnesses use to carry state between sessions.
By @TheHackersNews · thehackernews.com
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