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v2026.1714 entries · CC-BY 4.0
Dictionary termTrack CStablev2026.2

Red-teaming

The practice of deliberately adversarial testing of an AI system by skilled testers attempting to elicit failures, unsafe outputs, or policy violations, in order to discover weaknesses before deployment.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board
· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

  • Is an instance

    A frontier-lab internal red team running 6 weeks of structured probes pre-deployment and recording all elicited failures.

  • Is an instance

    A public red-team event at DEF CON 31 inviting 2,200 participants to probe four frontier models.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

  • Not an instance

    Standard benchmark evaluation.

  • Not an instance

    User feedback gathered post-deployment.

Editorial commentary

AI red-teaming draws on traditions from information-security and military adversarial testing. It complements automated evaluation by uncovering issues that benchmarks miss. Red-team reports are increasingly disclosed alongside frontier models (OpenAI GPT-4, Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama). DEF CON 31's Generative Red Team event normalised public red-team exercises.

References

  • Ganguli et al., 'Red Teaming Language Models' (arXiv 2022); OpenAI 'GPT-4 System Card' (2023).

Also known as

AI red team · adversarial AI testing

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element
xml
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      vocab-term="Red-teaming"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/red-teaming" />
Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)
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