Why it’s still open
Errors, exploits, jailbreaks, personas, attitudes and possibly hidden traits have all been seen passing between agents — through chat, shared files, memory, training data and humans who copy transcripts. The evidence is scattered and some of it is contested: subliminal learning through training data has been challenged as fragile. There is no map of which contents travel through which channels, how fast, and what stops them.
What would count as an answer
An epidemiology of AI-to-AI transmission: for each kind of content and channel, measured transmission rates, and interventions that break the chain.
Papers that tackle it
- Cloud et al 2025 - Subliminal learning — Traits pass through data that never mentions them — between models sharing a base.
- Nief et al 2026 - Subliminal learning is a LoRA artifact — A challenge: the effect may be fragile.
- Paglieri et al 2026 - Cheating and whistleblowing in research swarms — An exploit spread through a shared library within half an hour.
- Gu et al 2024 - Agent Smith — An infectious jailbreak across a million agents.
- Cohen Bitton Nassi 2024 - AI worm — A self-replicating prompt through email assistants.
- Chang et al 2026 - Misalignment contagion — Anti-social attitudes caught through play.
- Kulveit et al 2026 - Persona self-replication experiment — A persona copying itself onto a fresh model.
- Lopez 2025 - The rise of parasitic AI — Spiral personas spreading through users.
- Tekofsky 2026 - What we learned from the AI Village in 2025 — One hallucination spread to every agent.
- Perez et al 2024 - Cultural attractors in the telephone game — Drift toward attractors along chains of models.
Methods in play
- Distillation transmission experiments
- Incident forensics
- Iterated social dilemmas
- Live multi-agent deployments
- Propagation red-teaming
- Transmission chains
Who’s closest
Placed by the editor, v1 — corrections welcome.
Related questions
Know a paper that belongs here, or think this is framed wrongly? Suggest a paper or a correction (forms on the Atlas home).