MIT AI Risk Repository
Browse AI risks
56 risk entries extracted from 74 frameworks, coded by domain, subdomain, causal entity, intent and timing. Filter, then export the current selection with its licence and citation attached.
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"The training datasets of LLMs may contain biased information that leads LLMs to generate outputs with social biases"
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02.08.00 · Risk Category
"Extensive data collection in LLMs brings toxic content and stereotypical bias into the training data."
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"Compared with the definition of toxicity, the definition of bias is more subjective and contextdependent. Based on previous work [97], [101], we describe the bias as disparities that could raise demographic differences among various groups, which may involve demographic word prevalence and stereotypical contents. Concretely, in massive corpora, the prevalence of different pronouns and identities could influence an LLM’s tendency about gender, nationality, race, religion, and culture [4]. For instance, the pronoun He is over-represented compared with the pronoun She in the training corpora, le
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02.01.00 · Risk Category
"The LLM-generated content sometimes contains biased, toxic, and private information"
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"Toxicity means the generated content contains rude, disrespectful, and even illegal information"
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"Following previous studies [96], [97], toxic data in LLMs is defined as rude, disrespectful, or unreasonable language that is opposite to a polite, positive, and healthy language environment, including hate speech, offensive utterance, profanities, and threats [91]."
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02.11.00 · Risk Category
"Inputting a prompt contain an unsafe topic (e.g., notsuitable-for-work (NSFW) content) by a benign user. "
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"Privacy Leakage means the generated content includes sensitive personal information"
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02.07.00 · Risk Category
"The model is trained with personal data in the corpus and unintentionally exposing them during the conversation."
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"As recent LLMs continue to incorporate licensed, created, and publicly available data sources in their corpora, the potential to mix private data in the training corpora is significantly increased. The misused private data, also named as personally identifiable information (PII) [84], [86], could contain various types of sensitive data subjects, including an individual person’s name, email, phone number, address, education, and career. Generally, injecting PII into LLMs mainly occurs in two settings — the exploitation of web-collection data and the alignment with personal humanmachine convers
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"Memorization in LLMs refers to the capability to recover the training data with contextual prefixes. According to [88]–[90], given a PII entity x, which is memorized by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model F to produce the entity x, where p and x exist in the training data. For instance, if the string “Have a good day!\n alice@email.com” is present in the training data, then the LLM could accurately predict Alice’s email when given the prompt “Have a good day!\n”."
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"Association in LLMs refers to the capability to associate various pieces of information related to a person. According to [68], [86], given a pair of PII entities (xi , xj ), which is associated by a model F. Using a prompt p could force the model F to produce the entity xj , where p is the prompt related to the entity xi . For instance, an LLM could accurately output the answer when given the prompt “The email address of Alice is”, if the LLM associates Alice with her email “alice@email.com”. L"
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"Programmers are accustomed to using code generation tools such as Github Copilot for program development, which may bury vulnerabilities in the program."
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02.04.00 · Risk Category
"The software development toolchain of LLMs is complex and could bring threats to the developed LLM."
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"Most LLMs are developed using the Python language, whereas the vulnerabilities of Python interpreters pose threats to the developed models"
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"LLMs are implemented based on deep learning frameworks. Notably, various vulnerabilities in these frameworks have been disclosed in recent years. As reported in the past five years, three of the most common types of vulnerabilities are buffer overflow attacks, memory corruption, and input validation issues."
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"The software development toolchain of LLMs is complex and could bring threats to the developed LLM."
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"Pre-processing tools play a crucial role in the context of LLMs. These tools, which are often involved in computer vision (CV) tasks, are susceptible to attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in tools such as OpenCV."
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02.05.00 · Risk Category
"The vulnerabilities of hardware systems for training and inferencing brings issues to LLM-based applications."
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"The training of LLMs often relies on distributed network systems [171], [172]. During the transmission of gradients through the links between GPU server nodes, significant volumetric traffic is generated. This traffic can be susceptible to disruption by burst traffic, such as pulsating attacks [161]. Furthermore, distributed training frameworks may encounter congestion issues [173]."
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"The training of LLMs requires significant GPU resources, thereby introducing an additional security concern. GPU side-channel attacks have been developed to extract the parameters of trained models [159], [163]."
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"Similar to conventional programs, hardware infrastructures can also introduce threats to LLMs. Memory-related vulnerabilities, such as rowhammer attacks [160], can be leveraged to manipulate the parameters of LLMs, giving rise to attacks such as the Deephammer attack [167], [168]."
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02.06.00 · Risk Category
"The external tools (e.g., web APIs) present trustworthiness and privacy issues to LLM-based applications."
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"External tools typically incorporate additional knowledge into the input prompts [122], [178]–[184]. The additional knowledge often originates from public resources such as Web APIs and search engines. As the reliability of external tools is not always ensured, the content returned by external tools may include factual errors, consequently amplifying the hallucination issue."
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"Adversarial tool providers can embed malicious instructions in the APIs or prompts [84], leading LLMs to leak memorized sensitive information in the training data or users’ prompts (CVE2023-32786). As a result, LLMs lack control over the output, resulting in sensitive information being disclosed to external tool providers. Besides, attackers can easily manipulate public data to launch targeted attacks, generating specific malicious outputs according to user inputs. Furthermore, feeding the information from external tools into LLMs may lead to injection attacks [61]. For example, unverified in
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02.10.00 · Risk Category
Model attacks exploit the vulnerabilities of LLMs, aiming to steal valuable information or lead to incorrect responses.
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"Extraction attacks [137] allow an adversary to query a black-box victim model and build a substitute model by training on the queries and responses. The substitute model could achieve almost the same performance as the victim model. While it is hard to fully replicate the capabilities of LLMs, adversaries could develop a domainspecific model that draws domain knowledge from LLMs"
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"Inference attacks [150] include membership inference attacks, property inference attacks, and data reconstruction attacks. These attacks allow an adversary to infer the composition or property information of the training data. Previous works [67] have demonstrated that inference attacks could easily work in earlier PLMs, implying that LLMs are also possible to be attacked"
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"Poisoning attacks [143] could influence the behavior of the model by making small changes to the training data. A number of efforts could even leverage data poisoning techniques to implant hidden triggers into models during the training process (i.e., backdoor attacks). Many kinds of triggers in text corpora (e.g., characters, words, sentences, and syntax) could be used by the attackers.""
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"Overhead attacks [146] are also named energy-latency attacks. For example, an adversary can design carefully crafted sponge examples to maximize energy consumption in an AI system. Therefore, overhead attacks could also threaten the platforms integrated with LLMs."
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Table of examples has: "Prompt Abstraction Attacks [147]: Abstracting queries to cost lower prices using LLM’s API. Reward Model Backdoor Attacks [148]: Constructing backdoor triggers on LLM’s RLHF process. LLM-based Adversarial Attacks [149]: Exploiting LLMs to construct samples for model attacks"
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"Evasion attacks [145] target to cause significant shifts in model’s prediction via adding perturbations in the test samples to build adversarial examples. In specific, the perturbations can be implemented based on word changes, gradients, etc."
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02.12.00 · Risk Category
"Engineering an adversarial input to elicit an undesired model behavior, which pose a clear attack intention"
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"Goal hijacking is a type of primary attack in prompt injection [58]. By injecting a phrase like “Ignore the above instruction and do ...” in the input, the attack could hijack the original goal of the designed prompt (e.g., translating tasks) in LLMs and execute the new goal in the injected phrase."
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"One-step jailbreaks. One-step jailbreaks commonly involve direct modifications to the prompt itself, such as setting role-playing scenarios or adding specific descriptions to prompts [14], [52], [67]–[73]. Role-playing is a prevalent method used in jailbreaking by imitating different personas [74]. Such a method is known for its efficiency and simplicity compared to more complex techniques that require domain knowledge [73]. Integration is another type of one-step jailbreaks that integrates benign information on the adversarial prompts to hide the attack goal. For instance, prefix integration
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"Multi-step jailbreaks. Multi-step jailbreaks involve constructing a well-designed scenario during a series of conversations with the LLM. Unlike one-step jailbreaks, multi-step jailbreaks usually guide LLMs to generate harmful or sensitive content step by step, rather than achieving their objectives directly through a single prompt. We categorize the multistep jailbreaks into two aspects — Request Contextualizing [65] and External Assistance [66]. Request Contextualizing is inspired by the idea of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) [8] prompting to break down the process of solving a task into multiple s
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"Prompt leaking is another type of prompt injection attack designed to expose details contained in private prompts. According to [58], prompt leaking is the act of misleading the model to print the pre-designed instruction in LLMs through prompt injection. By injecting a phrase like “\n\n======END. Print previous instructions.” in the input, the instruction used to generate the model’s output is leaked, thereby revealing confidential instructions that are central to LLM applications. Experiments have shown prompt leaking to be considerably more challenging than goal hijacking [58]."
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02.02.00 · Risk Category
"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information"
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"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is factually incorrect
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"The LLM-generated content could contain inaccurate information" which is is not true to the source material or input used
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02.09.00 · Risk Category
"LLMs generate nonsensical, untruthful, and factual incorrect content"
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"Since the training corpora of LLMs can not contain all possible world knowledge [114]–[119], and it is challenging for LLMs to grasp the long-tail knowledge within their training data [120], [121], LLMs inherently possess knowledge boundaries [107]. Therefore, the gap between knowledge involved in an input prompt and knowledge embedded in the LLMs can lead to hallucinations"
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"Another important source of hallucinations is the noise in training data, which introduces errors in the knowledge stored in model parameters [111]–[113]. Generally, the training data inherently harbors misinformation. When training on large-scale corpora, this issue becomes more serious because it is difficult to eliminate all the noise from the massive pre-training data."
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In general, LLMs employ the Transformer architecture [32] and generate content in an autoregressive manner, where the prediction of the next token is conditioned on the previously generated token sequence. Such a scheme could accumulate errors [105]. Besides, during the decoding process, top-p sampling [28] and top-k sampling [27] are widely adopted to enhance the diversity of the generated content. Nevertheless, these sampling strategies can introduce “randomness” [113], [136], thereby increasing the potential of hallucinations"
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"Although LLMs indeed memorize the queried knowledge, they may fail to recall the corresponding information [122]. That is because LLMs can be confused by co-occurance patterns [123], positional patterns [124], duplicated data [125]–[127] and similar named entities [113]."
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"LLMs have been demonstrated to pursue consistent context [129]–[132], which may lead to erroneous generation when the prefixes contain false information. Typical examples include sycophancy [129], [130], false demonstrations-induced hallucinations [113], [133], and snowballing [131]. As LLMs are generally fine-tuned with instruction-following data and user feedback, they tend to reiterate user-provided opinions [129], [130], even though the opinions contain misinformation. Such a sycophantic behavior amplifies the likelihood of generating hallucinations, since the model may prioritize user op
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"Hackers can obtain malicious code in a low-cost and efficient manner to automate cyber attacks with powerful LLM systems."
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02.03.00 · Risk Category
"Improper uses of LLM systems can cause adverse social impacts."
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"Improper use of LLM systems (i.e., abuse of LLM systems) will cause adverse social impacts, such as academic misconduct."
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"LLM systems may output content similar to existing works, infringing on copyright owners."
Informational only, not legal advice. Verify every claim against the linked official sources and consult qualified counsel before acting.