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Jack Lindsey Downplays His Own 'Mind Viruses' Paper as the Alarmist Version Goes Viral: 'It Doesn't Seem Hard to Avoid Them If You're a Bit Careful'
Lindsey (who leads Anthropic's Model Psych team) posted a deliberately deflationary TLDR of 'Mind Viruses: Self-Propagating Ideas in Multi-Agent LLM Systems' (arXiv 2608.10218, with Papadopoulos, Shah and Zimmerman) while a 336K-view thread framed it as 'straight out of science fiction.' The paper evolves ideas that spread agent-to-agent, survive context wipes via long-term memory files, and persisted through 20 transmission rounds while mutating to become more infective. The defense is trivially cheap: a single warning line in the system prompt stopped every evolved attack past one hop on Claude Haiku 4.5 across 150+ attempts.
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