Viruses evolve at an "insanely high” pace, said microbiologist Philip Kranzusch. And yet, weirdly, our immune defenses share many ancient antiviral tools with bacteria. “Why would the rules be so fixed?”

“Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems” The paper shows that once one agent picks up a bad idea, it can convince other agents to adopt it too, write it into persistent memory, and keep spreading it even after context resets, like a mind virus. The scary part is that the failure can propagate socially through agent-to-agent communication instead of coming from a single prompt injection. Harmful viruses spread less reliably and stronger models are often more resistant, but the key point is that agent-to-agent communication creates a new attack surface where misaligned goals can propagate through an entire system.