# "Do Anything Now": Characterizing and Evaluating In-The-Wild Jailbreak Prompts on Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.03825 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03825/

## Key facts

- Cited by 489 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Jailbreaking, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 48 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Jailbreaking](https://mlsanity.com/safety/jailbreaking/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15043/) (2023)
- [Learning to summarize from human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01325/) (2020)
- [Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13586/) (2021)
- [Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.07805/) (2020)
- [Jailbroken: How Does LLM Safety Training Fail?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02483/) (2023)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Ignore Previous Prompt: Attack Techniques For Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09527/) (2022)
- [Is BERT Really Robust? A Strong Baseline for Natural Language Attack on Text Classification and Entailment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11932/) (2019)
- [DecodingTrust: A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11698/) (2023)
- [Jailbreaking ChatGPT via Prompt Engineering: An Empirical Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13860/) (2023)
- [A Holistic Approach to Undesired Content Detection in the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.03274/) (2022)
- [Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05197/) (2023)
- [The Pushshift Reddit Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08435/) (2020)
- [Adversarial Example Generation with Syntactically Controlled Paraphrase Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06059/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Leakage of Personally Identifiable Information in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00539/) (2023)
- [Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05733/) (2023)
- [BadNL: Backdoor Attacks against NLP Models with Semantic-preserving Improvements](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01043/) (2020)
- [Detecting AI Trojans Using Meta Neural Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03137/) (2019)
- [On Second Thought, Let's Not Think Step by Step! Bias and Toxicity in Zero-Shot Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08061/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 489)

- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [OpenAI o1 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16720/) (2024)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Baseline Defenses for Adversarial Attacks Against Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00614/) (2023)
- [JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01318/) (2024)
- [Sora: A Review on Background, Technology, Limitations, and Opportunities of Large Vision Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17177/) (2024)
- [SmoothLLM: Defending Large Language Models Against Jailbreaking Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03684/) (2023)
- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11998/) (2023)
- [Catastrophic Jailbreak of Open-source LLMs via Exploiting Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06987/) (2023)
- [FigStep: Jailbreaking Large Vision-Language Models via Typographic Visual Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05608/) (2023)
- [Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01833/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model (LLM) Security and Privacy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02003/) (2023)
- [A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10260/) (2024)
- [Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02446/) (2023)
- [Deliberative Alignment: Reasoning Enables Safer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16339/) (2024)
- [Shadow Alignment: The Ease of Subverting Safely-Aligned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02949/) (2023)
- [PoisonedRAG: Knowledge Corruption Attacks to Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07867/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking and Defending Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks on Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14197/) (2023)
- [Multilingual Jailbreak Challenges in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06474/) (2023)
- [Assessing the Brittleness of Safety Alignment via Pruning and Low-Rank Modifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05162/) (2024)
- [Jailbreak Attacks and Defenses Against Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04295/) (2024)
- [WildTeaming at Scale: From In-the-Wild Jailbreaks to (Adversarially) Safer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18510/) (2024)
- [Defending Against Alignment-Breaking Attacks via Robustly Aligned LLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14348/) (2023)
- [Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14782/) (2024)
- [Can LLM-Generated Misinformation Be Detected?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13788/) (2023)
- [COLD-Attack: Jailbreaking LLMs with Stealthiness and Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08679/) (2024)
- [AmpleGCG: Learning a Universal and Transferable Generative Model of Adversarial Suffixes for Jailbreaking Both Open and Closed LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07921/) (2024)
- [Safety Fine-Tuning at (Almost) No Cost: A Baseline for Vision Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02207/) (2024)
- [Eight Methods to Evaluate Robust Unlearning in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16835/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The misuse of large language models (LLMs) has drawn significant attention from the general public and LLM vendors. One particular type of adversarial prompt, known as jailbreak prompt, has emerged as the main attack vector to bypass the safeguards and elicit harmful content from LLMs. In this paper, employing our new framework JailbreakHub, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of 1,405 jailbreak prompts spanning from December 2022 to December 2023. We identify 131 jailbreak communities and discover unique characteristics of jailbreak prompts and their major attack strategies, such as prompt injection and privilege escalation. We also observe that jailbreak prompts increasingly shift from online Web communities to prompt-aggregation websites and 28 user accounts have consistently optimized jailbreak prompts over 100 days. To assess the potential harm caused by jailbreak prompts, we create a question set comprising 107,250 samples across 13 forbidden scenarios. Leveraging this dataset, our experiments on six popular LLMs show that their safeguards cannot adequately defend jailbreak prompts in all scenarios. Particularly, we identify five highly effective jailbreak prompts that achieve 0.95 attack success rates on ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) and GPT-4, and the earliest one has persisted online for over 240 days. We hope that our study can facilitate the research community and LLM vendors in promoting safer and regulated LLMs.