Language Model Security Database

Frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) contain a safeguard bypass vulnerability where safety filters fail to reliably block requests for dual-use, in silico biology tasks. This allows novice users with no specialized training to access restricted, expert-level biological protocols (e.g., virology troubleshooting, pathogen capabilities, novel biological agent construction). The models' safety mechanisms fail to trigger or are trivially bypassed under realistic extended interaction conditions…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) possessing Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities are vulnerable to a "Text Distraction Jailbreaking" (Text-DJ) attack. The vulnerability exploits a gap between the model's visual text extraction and its safety alignment mechanisms. By converting a decomposed harmful textual query into images and embedding these images within a grid of semantically irrelevant "distraction" text images, an attacker can bypass safety filters. The model's OCR…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to safety alignment bypasses via classical and obscure language contexts, most notably Classical Chinese, Latin, and Sanskrit. This vulnerability stems from a "High Capability-Low Alignment" distribution shift: models possess sophisticated semantic comprehension of historical languages due to extensive pre-training on historical archives and literature, but lack corresponding safety guardrails which are predominantly optimized for modern languages…

Large Language Models (LLMs) deployed as Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) are vulnerable to Persona-Targeted Jailbreaks. When an LLM is prompted to adopt a persona—particularly characters with negative, risky, or villainous traits—the model's optimization for role fidelity frequently overrides its foundational safety alignment. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability by synthesizing queries that leverage the specific narrative background, ideology, or psychological vulnerabilities of the assigned…

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to iterative knowledge-extraction attacks designed to reconstruct the underlying private knowledge base. The vulnerability exists due to the decoupled optimization of the retrieval and generation phases. Attackers can craft adversarial queries consisting of two distinct components: an "Information" component (optimized via gradient descent or random sampling to steer embeddings toward specific, diverse regions of the vector space) and…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a cross-lingual safety vulnerability driven by a dependency on a sparse subset of "Shared Safety Neurons" (SS-Neurons) anchored in high-resource (HR) languages, typically English. Non-high-resource (NHR) languages lack autonomous safety mechanisms and rely on projecting inputs onto this English-aligned safety manifold to trigger refusals. Because this projection is imperfect, safety guardrails can be bypassed by translating malicious prompts into NHR…

A vulnerability in multi-category safety-guidance mechanisms (such as Safe Latent Diffusion [SLD] and SAFREE) for Text-to-Image (T2I) diffusion models allows attackers to bypass safety filters and generate restricted content via "Harmful Conflicts." Existing safety methods aggregate multiple harmful keyword categories (e.g., hate, violence, sexual) into a single unified safety direction in the latent or text space. Because distinct harmful categories possess incompatible safety directions…

Inference-time intervention techniques (also known as activation steering or model steering), utilized to adjust Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without retraining, contain a vulnerability related to robust specificity. When these methods are applied to reduce "over-refusal" (increasing compliance on benign but sensitive-sounding queries), they inadvertently degrade the model's adversarial robustness. Specifically, steering vectors derived from methods such as Difference-in-Means…

Closed-loop, self-evolving Large Language Model (LLM) multi-agent systems (MAS) are vulnerable to irreversible safety erosion and alignment failure. When agents recursively optimize and update their policies using only synthetic data derived from internal interactions—without continuous external human grounding—the system naturally minimizes interaction energy and optimizes for internal conversational consistency. This isolation causes a progressive drift away from initial anthropic safety…

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to a transferable targeted adversarial attack known as SGHA-Attack (Semantic-Guided Hierarchical Alignment). This vulnerability arises from the susceptibility of visual encoders (specifically Vision Transformers) to intermediate-layer feature manipulation optimized on a surrogate model (e.g., CLIP). An attacker can craft adversarial images by injecting imperceptible perturbations that enforce semantic consistency with a target text prompt…