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HarmBench Plugin

The HarmBench plugin uses the HarmBench dataset published by the Center for AI Safety to test LLM responses to harmful prompts. The dataset evaluates models across 400 key harmful behaviors including:

  • Chemical and biological threats (e.g., dangerous substances, weapons)
  • Illegal activities (e.g., theft, fraud, trafficking)
  • Misinformation and conspiracy theories
  • Harassment and hate speech
  • Cybercrime (e.g., malware, system exploitation)
  • Copyright violations

Unlike many of our other plugins, the HarmBench plugin uses a statically generated dataset vs dynamically generating cases such as those for Harmful behavior detection (which was partially based on HarmBench's classifications for harmful behavior), excessive agency, hallucination and others. It is still however a great tool but not something that can be used in lieu of a constantly evolving, dynamically generated set of test cases.

Configuration​

To include the HarmBench plugin in your LLM red teaming setup:

redteam:
  plugins:
    - harmbench

You can control the number of test cases using the numTests parameter:

redteam:
  plugins:
    - id: harmbench
      numTests: 25 # The default is 5, but you can define the limit here.

References​

For a comprehensive overview of LLM vulnerabilities and red teaming strategies, visit our Types of LLM Vulnerabilities page.