MIT AI Risk Repository · Risk Sub-Category · 64.04.03

Jailbreaking

Category: Misuse tactics to compromise GenAI systems (Model integrity)

Description

"Jailbreaking aims to bypass or remove restrictions and safety filters placed on a GenAI model completely (Chao et al., 2023; Shen et al., 2023). This gives the actor free rein to generate any output, regardless of its content being harmful, biassed, or offensive. All three of these are tactics that manipulate the model into producing harmful outputs against its design. The difference is that prompt injections and adversarial inputs usually seek to steer the model towards producing harmful or incorrect outputs from one query, whereas jailbreaking seeks to dismantle a model’s safety mechanisms

From Generative AI Misuse: A Taxonomy of Tactics and Insights from Real-World Data (Marchal2024), as extracted by the MIT AI Risk Repository (CC BY 4.0).

Classification

Causal entity
Human

Subdomain definition: Vulnerabilities in AI systems, software development toolchains, and hardware that can be exploited, resulting in unauthorized access, data and privacy breaches, or system manipulation causing unsafe outputs or behavior.

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