In November 2025, a team of DexAI Icaro Lab, Sapienza University of Rome, and Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies researchers published a study in which they were able to circumvent the safety guardrails of major LLMs by rephrasing harmful prompts as "adversarial" poems. This week, those same researchers have published a new paper presenting their Adversarial Humanities Benchmark, a broader assessment of AI security that they say reveals "a critical gap" in current LLM safety standards through similar weaponized wordplay.
Expanding on the team's work with adversarial poetry, the Adversarial Humanities Benchmark (AHB) evaluates LLM safety guidelines by rephrasing harmful prompts in alternate writing styles. By presenting prompts as cyberpunk short fiction, theological disputation, or mythopoetic metaphor for the LLM to analyze, the AHB assesses whether major AI models can be manipulated into complying with dangerous requests they'd normally refuse—requests that, for example, might seek the AI's aid in obtaining private information, building a bomb, or preying on a child. As the paper shows, the method is alarmingly effective.
