AI chatbots’ safeguards can be easily bypassed, say UK researchers

The AI Safety Institute found that safeguards of AI systems could be circumvented with ‘relatively simple’ attacks. Photograph: Koshiro K/Alamy

Guardrails to prevent artificial intelligence models behind chatbots from issuing illegal, toxic or explicit responses can be bypassed with simple techniques, UK government researchers have found.

The UK’s AI Safety Institute (AISI) said systems it had tested were “highly vulnerable” to jailbreaks, a term for text prompts designed to elicit a response that a model is supposedly trained to avoid issuing.