English

AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research

Cryptography and Security 2026-05-25 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

This work examines an imbalance in artificial intelligence (AI) security research: the field tends to produce more work on attacking AI systems than on defending them. Drawing on related academic papers, we find biased attack-to-defense ratios across subfields, including federated learning, speech recognition, membership inference, large language models, etc. The imbalance possibly means far beyond a simple count: attack papers are routinely evaluated under favorable conditions that make threats look more severe than they are in practice, while defenses are held to a stricter standard that few can meet. The result is a literature rich in demonstrated vulnerabilities and thin on usable and deployed protections. We thus argue that AI security research should better incentivize defense research.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.23448,
  title  = {AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research},
  author = {Youqian Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.23448},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages,3 figures,3 tables

R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:27:59.503Z