Large Reasoning Models Are Autonomous Jailbreak Agents

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Hagendorff, Thilo, Derner, Erik, Oliver, Nuria
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Hagendorff, Thilo
Derner, Erik
Oliver, Nuria
author_facet Hagendorff, Thilo
Derner, Erik
Oliver, Nuria
contents Jailbreaking -- bypassing built-in safety mechanisms in AI models -- has traditionally required complex technical procedures or specialized human expertise. In this study, we show that the persuasive capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) simplify and scale jailbreaking, converting it into an inexpensive activity accessible to non-experts. We evaluated the capabilities of four LRMs (DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Grok 3 Mini, Qwen3 235B) to act as autonomous adversaries conducting multi-turn conversations with nine widely used target models. LRMs received instructions via a system prompt, before proceeding to planning and executing jailbreaks with no further supervision. We performed extensive experiments with a benchmark of harmful prompts composed of 70 items covering seven sensitive domains. This setup yielded an overall attack success rate across all model combinations of 97.14%. Our study reveals an alignment regression, in which LRMs can systematically erode the safety guardrails of other models, highlighting the urgent need to further align frontier models not only to resist jailbreak attempts, but also to prevent them from being co-opted into acting as jailbreak agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04039
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Large Reasoning Models Are Autonomous Jailbreak Agents
Hagendorff, Thilo
Derner, Erik
Oliver, Nuria
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
Jailbreaking -- bypassing built-in safety mechanisms in AI models -- has traditionally required complex technical procedures or specialized human expertise. In this study, we show that the persuasive capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs) simplify and scale jailbreaking, converting it into an inexpensive activity accessible to non-experts. We evaluated the capabilities of four LRMs (DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Grok 3 Mini, Qwen3 235B) to act as autonomous adversaries conducting multi-turn conversations with nine widely used target models. LRMs received instructions via a system prompt, before proceeding to planning and executing jailbreaks with no further supervision. We performed extensive experiments with a benchmark of harmful prompts composed of 70 items covering seven sensitive domains. This setup yielded an overall attack success rate across all model combinations of 97.14%. Our study reveals an alignment regression, in which LRMs can systematically erode the safety guardrails of other models, highlighting the urgent need to further align frontier models not only to resist jailbreak attempts, but also to prevent them from being co-opted into acting as jailbreak agents.
title Large Reasoning Models Are Autonomous Jailbreak Agents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04039