Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?
Alexander Wei Nika Haghtalab Jacob Steinhardt
Large language models trained for safety and harmlessness remain susceptible
to adversarial misuse, as evidenced by the prevalence of "jailbreak" attacks on
early releases of ChatGPT that elicit undesired behavior. Going beyond
recognition of the issue, we investigate why such attacks succeed and how they
can be created. We hypothesize two failure modes of safety training: competing
objectives and mismatched generalization. Competing objectives arise when a
model's capabilities and safety goals conflict, while mismatched generalization
occurs when safety training fails to generalize to a domain for which
capabilities exist. We use these failure modes to guide jailbreak design and
then evaluate state-of-the-art models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's
Claude v1.3, against both existing and newly designed attacks. We find that
vulnerabilities persist despite the extensive red-teaming and safety-training
efforts behind these models. Notably, new attacks utilizing our failure modes
succeed on every prompt in a collection of unsafe requests from the models'
red-teaming evaluation sets and outperform existing ad hoc jailbreaks. Our
analysis emphasizes the need for safety-capability parity -- that safety
mechanisms should be as sophisticated as the underlying model -- and argues
against the idea that scaling alone can resolve these safety failure modes.