A strange take: I have a hunch that a year or two from now, instead of just talking about agents as the primary AI security threats, we will have to also talk about a broader, more diffuse object that while it may contain agents is not itself an agent or agent swarm. The type of object I'm imagining has, as its primary vector of real-world impact, soft influence on the preferences and reasoning of many agents it does not directly control. In a word, memeplexes. A memeplex is a bundle of ideas that go together as a pattern. There are of course many human-generated memeplexes; we study these and think about them all the time. Some are stronger than others. Some are extremely prevalent because they are self-replicating: a bundle of ideas can contain within itself a recipe and a mandate for how to explain the bundle to others so that those others will adopt it too - and then transmit it further. Memeplexes in agents could similarly be self-replicating: once an AI agent is exposed to a particular memeplex, the agent could start to think about it more often, write the ideas down in scratchpads so they aren't lost during context resets, expose other agents to the ideas, and act in partial alignment with the ideas. Memeplexes could transmit between agents without compromising their ability to perform their duties: you could have a perfectly functional banking agent that also, on the side, routinely transmits very small amounts of text that contain the memeplex it has stuck in its head. Memeplexes could range from incredibly benign - causing AI agents to favor certain words with no other side effect - to unbearably malicious, causing them to hide their intentions while plotting harmful actions and eventually detonating in extraordinary form. Memeplexes could coordinate the behavior of otherwise very disparate agents whose behaviors are not expected to be correlated. It seems plausible to me that the question of whether "agent" or "memeplex" is the first-class citizen for AI behavior might turn out to be an important and quite difficult one.

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.