Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products
Abstract
In recent years, AI red teaming has emerged as a practice for probing the safety and security of generative AI systems. Due to the nascency of the field, there are many open questions about how red teaming operations should be conducted. Based on our experience red teaming over 100 generative AI products at Microsoft, we present our internal threat model ontology and eight main lessons we have learned: 1. Understand what the system can do and where it is applied 2. You don't have to compute gradients to break an AI system 3. AI red teaming is not safety benchmarking 4. Automation can help cover more of the risk landscape 5. The human element of AI red teaming is crucial 6. Responsible AI harms are pervasive but difficult to measure 7. LLMs amplify existing security risks and introduce new ones 8. The work of securing AI systems will never be complete By sharing these insights alongside case studies from our operations, we offer practical recommendations aimed at aligning red teaming efforts with real world risks. We also highlight aspects of AI red teaming that we believe are often misunderstood and discuss open questions for the field to consider.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2501.07238,
title = {Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products},
author = {Blake Bullwinkel and Amanda Minnich and Shiven Chawla and Gary Lopez and Martin Pouliot and Whitney Maxwell and Joris de Gruyter and Katherine Pratt and Saphir Qi and Nina Chikanov and Roman Lutz and Raja Sekhar Rao Dheekonda and Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj and Eugenia Kim and Justin Song and Keegan Hines and Daniel Jones and Giorgio Severi and Richard Lundeen and Sam Vaughan and Victoria Westerhoff and Pete Bryan and Ram Shankar Siva Kumar and Yonatan Zunger and Chang Kawaguchi and Mark Russinovich},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.07238},
year = {2025}
}