Artificial Intelligence Red-Teaming

AI red-teaming is the authorised, adversarial testing of an artificial intelligence system to discover harmful behaviours before they are exploited in real use. Evaluators deliberately create difficult prompts, interactions and operating conditions that may reveal dangerous capabilities, policy bypasses or failures hidden by ordinary benchmark testing.

How the evaluation is conducted

Red teams test the system as a motivated attacker or high-risk user would, while keeping potentially harmful experiments controlled.

• A threat model identifies possible adversaries, assets at risk, misuse pathways and unacceptable outcomes.
• Evaluators use adversarial prompts, role-playing, multilingual variations and multi-step conversations to probe beyond standard responses.
• The model may be given controlled access to tools or sandboxes to test whether it can plan and execute harmful sequences rather than merely describe them.
• Successful attacks are recorded as reproducible test cases, assessed for severity and retested after safeguards are changed.

Capabilities that testing can expose

Red-teaming distinguishes what a model can potentially do from what it usually does under normal instructions.

• It can test whether dual-use knowledge substantially assists harmful biological, chemical or other high-risk activity.
• It can reveal cyber capabilities, such as identifying vulnerabilities, generating malicious code or chaining steps into an attack.
• Agent evaluations can examine harmful autonomy, including persistent planning, tool misuse and attempts to evade oversight.
• Privacy and information-integrity tests can expose data leakage, manipulation, deceptive outputs or circumvention of content safeguards.

Interpretation and limits

A successful test demonstrates a vulnerability or capability, but an unsuccessful test does not prove that the system is safe.

• Results depend on evaluator expertise, system access, prompting methods and test coverage; rare or novel failures may remain undiscovered.
• Testing should occur under authorisation and containment because demonstrating a capability may itself create risk.
• Red-teaming is therefore one layer of defence-in-depth, alongside risk assessment, independent evaluation, access controls, monitoring and incident response.