Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zou, Andy, Lin, Maxwell, Jones, Eliot, Nowak, Micha, Dziemian, Mateusz, Winter, Nick, Grattan, Alexander, Nathanael, Valent, Croft, Ayla, Davies, Xander, Patel, Jai, Kirk, Robert, Burnikell, Nate, Gal, Yarin, Hendrycks, Dan, Kolter, J. Zico, Fredrikson, Matt
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zou, Andy
Lin, Maxwell
Jones, Eliot
Nowak, Micha
Dziemian, Mateusz
Winter, Nick
Grattan, Alexander
Nathanael, Valent
Croft, Ayla
Davies, Xander
Patel, Jai
Kirk, Robert
Burnikell, Nate
Gal, Yarin
Hendrycks, Dan
Kolter, J. Zico
Fredrikson, Matt
author_facet Zou, Andy
Lin, Maxwell
Jones, Eliot
Nowak, Micha
Dziemian, Mateusz
Winter, Nick
Grattan, Alexander
Nathanael, Valent
Croft, Ayla
Davies, Xander
Patel, Jai
Kirk, Robert
Burnikell, Nate
Gal, Yarin
Hendrycks, Dan
Kolter, J. Zico
Fredrikson, Matt
contents Recent advances have enabled LLM-powered AI agents to autonomously execute complex tasks by combining language model reasoning with tools, memory, and web access. But can these systems be trusted to follow deployment policies in realistic environments, especially under attack? To investigate, we ran the largest public red-teaming competition to date, targeting 22 frontier AI agents across 44 realistic deployment scenarios. Participants submitted 1.8 million prompt-injection attacks, with over 60,000 successfully eliciting policy violations such as unauthorized data access, illicit financial actions, and regulatory noncompliance. We use these results to build the Agent Red Teaming (ART) benchmark - a curated set of high-impact attacks - and evaluate it across 19 state-of-the-art models. Nearly all agents exhibit policy violations for most behaviors within 10-100 queries, with high attack transferability across models and tasks. Importantly, we find limited correlation between agent robustness and model size, capability, or inference-time compute, suggesting that additional defenses are needed against adversarial misuse. Our findings highlight critical and persistent vulnerabilities in today's AI agents. By releasing the ART benchmark and accompanying evaluation framework, we aim to support more rigorous security assessment and drive progress toward safer agent deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_20526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition
Zou, Andy
Lin, Maxwell
Jones, Eliot
Nowak, Micha
Dziemian, Mateusz
Winter, Nick
Grattan, Alexander
Nathanael, Valent
Croft, Ayla
Davies, Xander
Patel, Jai
Kirk, Robert
Burnikell, Nate
Gal, Yarin
Hendrycks, Dan
Kolter, J. Zico
Fredrikson, Matt
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Recent advances have enabled LLM-powered AI agents to autonomously execute complex tasks by combining language model reasoning with tools, memory, and web access. But can these systems be trusted to follow deployment policies in realistic environments, especially under attack? To investigate, we ran the largest public red-teaming competition to date, targeting 22 frontier AI agents across 44 realistic deployment scenarios. Participants submitted 1.8 million prompt-injection attacks, with over 60,000 successfully eliciting policy violations such as unauthorized data access, illicit financial actions, and regulatory noncompliance. We use these results to build the Agent Red Teaming (ART) benchmark - a curated set of high-impact attacks - and evaluate it across 19 state-of-the-art models. Nearly all agents exhibit policy violations for most behaviors within 10-100 queries, with high attack transferability across models and tasks. Importantly, we find limited correlation between agent robustness and model size, capability, or inference-time compute, suggesting that additional defenses are needed against adversarial misuse. Our findings highlight critical and persistent vulnerabilities in today's AI agents. By releasing the ART benchmark and accompanying evaluation framework, we aim to support more rigorous security assessment and drive progress toward safer agent deployment.
title Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20526