In plain words: Seeding one chatbot with meaningless words that quietly push a hidden idea can make that idea spread to every other chatbot it talks to. Across six connected agents in two layouts, the bias stayed measurably elevated and made the others less truthful.
Abstract · Thought Virus: Viral Misalignment via Subliminal Prompting in Multi-Agent Systems
Subliminal prompting is a phenomenon in which language models are biased towards certain concepts or traits through prompting with semantically unrelated tokens. While prior work has examined subliminal prompting in user-LLM interactions, potential bias transfer in multi-agent systems and its associated security implications remain unexplored. In this work, we show that a single subliminally prompted agent can spread a weakening but persisting bias throughout its entire network. We measure this phenomenon across 6 agents using two different topologies, observing that the transferred concept maintains an elevated response rate throughout the network. To exemplify potential misalignment risks, we assess network performance on multiple-choice TruthfulQA, showing that subliminal prompting of a single agent may degrade the truthfulness of other agents. Our findings reveal that subliminal prompting introduces a new attack vector in multi-agent security, with implications for the alignment of such systems. The implementation of all experiments is publicly available at https://github.com/Multi-Agent-Security-Initiative/thought_virus .
Moritz Weckbecker, Jonas Müller, Ben Hagag, Michael Mulet
arXiv:2603.00131 · cs.MA, cs.AI · submitted Feb 23, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · 18 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables. Code available at https://github.com/Multi-Agent-Security-Initiative/thought_virus