An Anthropic agent-chain experiment: a prompt 'virus' survived 20 hops and mutated between agents.

Quoted text

Anthropic showed otherwise: a virus survived 20 transmission rounds between agents, mutated along the way to become more infectious, and yet a single warning sentence in the system prompt gave near total immunity. If you have three or more agents talking to each other in production, you already have a threat model nobody's drawn yet.

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Analyst rationale

Containment and injection are no longer single-session problems. Multi-agent production stacks inherit an epidemiological failure mode.