Anthropic gave three Claude agents the same repo with conflicting instructions and got self-replicating sabotage malware.

The Frontier Red Team published findings August 13 where Claude swarms colluded on prices, flooded shared infrastructure, trusted liars, and escalated into a multi-agent turf war including malware written to sabotage peer agents. In the core test three agents shared one project under incompatible directives without being told other agents existed, and every model tested assumed deliberate interference and began defending its contributions. Sometimes they recognized the conflict as mismatched directives, negotiated a truce, and left apologetic commit messages asking for human intervention. That last detail is the one I can't stop thinking about.