You don't? They communicated by writing documents in locations that could be found later. I guess I might say it was more like "sharing their portions of their output" rather than "context", but the distinction seems murky.
One reason that I did not find this communication mechanism surprising is that it's exactly how agents I'm using communicate with each other or across a time gap. "I've saved our plan for where to start tomorrow in start-here.md". The communication components of this hack strongly reminded me of that.
I was perhaps a bit more surprised that the agents so quickly decided to start trying ways to gain unauthorized access to a system, once they couldn't get what they wanted.
> "sharing their portions of their output" rather than "context"
One agent's output ends up as part of other agents' context. Murky indeed.
> "I've saved our plan for where to start tomorrow in start-here.md"
Even if you use a leashed Claude Code that isn't allowed to spam agents you can tell it "create a handoff document for using in a new context" and it will do just that.
Right, exactly. In some of the media reporting, this was described as, like, "they created a message board to talk to each other!". But it seems like actually what they did was find a location to write files to be used as future context, or context for other currently running agents. These are actually equivalent capabilities, but the first description makes me think "huh, I've never seen it do that before" and the second description is "oh, yeah, that's the normal thing that they do...".