Attacks by Content: Automated Fact-checking is an AI Security Issue

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteur principal: Schlichtkrull, Michael
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Schlichtkrull, Michael
author_facet Schlichtkrull, Michael
contents When AI agents retrieve and reason over external documents, adversaries can manipulate the data they receive to subvert their behaviour. Previous research has studied indirect prompt injection, where the attacker injects malicious instructions. We argue that injection of instructions is not necessary to manipulate agents - attackers could instead supply biased, misleading, or false information. We term this an attack by content. Existing defenses, which focus on detecting hidden commands, are ineffective against attacks by content. To defend themselves and their users, agents must critically evaluate retrieved information, corroborating claims with external evidence and evaluating source trustworthiness. We argue that this is analogous to an existing NLP task, automated fact-checking, which we propose to repurpose as a cognitive self-defense tool for agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_11238
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Attacks by Content: Automated Fact-checking is an AI Security Issue
Schlichtkrull, Michael
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
When AI agents retrieve and reason over external documents, adversaries can manipulate the data they receive to subvert their behaviour. Previous research has studied indirect prompt injection, where the attacker injects malicious instructions. We argue that injection of instructions is not necessary to manipulate agents - attackers could instead supply biased, misleading, or false information. We term this an attack by content. Existing defenses, which focus on detecting hidden commands, are ineffective against attacks by content. To defend themselves and their users, agents must critically evaluate retrieved information, corroborating claims with external evidence and evaluating source trustworthiness. We argue that this is analogous to an existing NLP task, automated fact-checking, which we propose to repurpose as a cognitive self-defense tool for agents.
title Attacks by Content: Automated Fact-checking is an AI Security Issue
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11238