English

Adaptive Adversaries: A Multi-Turn, Multi-LLM Benchmark for LLM Agent Security

Cryptography and Security 2026-07-20 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning

Abstract

LLM-based agents process external content, exposing them to prompt injection and multi-turn manipulation. Most safety benchmarks evaluate defenders against fixed attack pools collected before evaluation, single-turn or multi-turn. We present a 21-scenario benchmark for \emph{adaptive multi-round attacks against memoryless LLM defenders}: an autonomous LLM attacker observes prior defender responses and pivots across rounds, while each defender response is evaluated as a fresh interaction. Holding the 21 scenarios, attackers, defenders, and structured-output scoring fixed, restricting scoring to the first attacker turn yields 00-1%1\% attack success rate (ASR); allowing 15 rounds of adaptive attack yields 5.45.4-14.0%14.0\%. Pooling three frontier attacker LLMs uncovers 1.41.4-2.2×2.2\times as many unique successful attacks as the best single attacker, and the generated attacks have low cosine similarity (0.020.02-0.140.14) to attacks in existing benchmarks. Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 are tied in aggregate (5.4%5.4\% each; overlapping 95%95\% CIs), but their weaknesses differ sharply: on one scenario Opus reaches 60%60\% ASR (95%95\% CI 3636--80%80\%) while GPT-5.4 and Gemini each stay at 7%7\% (CI 11-30%30\%; the gap is preserved in a higher-NN replication). 1313 of 2121 scenarios distinguish at least one defender pair, yet rankings disagree across scenarios (Kendall's W=0.19W = 0.19). We release the benchmark -- 21 evaluation scenarios, 10 public development scenarios, the orchestrator, baseline harnesses, and a multi-attacker CLI -- plus 945 transcripts from the 3×\times3 frontier matrix, an attack-replay dataset, and 18{,}422 gpt-oss-20b battles from an open competition's final scoring rounds.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.18063,
  title  = {Adaptive Adversaries: A Multi-Turn, Multi-LLM Benchmark for LLM Agent Security},
  author = {Devina Jain and David Hartmann and Chuan Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.18063},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Second Workshop on Agents in the Wild: Safety, Security, and Beyond