# AttackPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.19536 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19536/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Agent threats, guardrails and governance, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 44 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Nov 2025.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Agent threats, guardrails and governance](https://mlsanity.com/agents/agent-threats-guardrails-and-governance/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [Towards Deep Learning Models Resistant to Adversarial Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.06083/) (2017)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.04644/) (2016)
- [Xception: Deep Learning with Depthwise Separable Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02357/) (2016)
- [Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05820/) (2016)
- [WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13854/) (2023)
- [Adversarial examples in the physical world](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.02533/) (2016)
- [SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.15793/) (2024)
- [Not what you've signed up for: Compromising Real-World LLM-Integrated Applications with Indirect Prompt Injection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12173/) (2023)
- [OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07972/) (2024)
- [The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06292/) (2024)
- [Stealing Machine Learning Models via Prediction APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.02943/) (2016)
- [Exploiting Unintended Feature Leakage in Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04049/) (2018)
- [ML-Leaks: Model and Data Independent Membership Inference Attacks and Defenses on Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.01246/) (2018)
- [DS-1000: A Natural and Reliable Benchmark for Data Science Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.11501/) (2022)
- [Age Progression/Regression by Conditional Adversarial Autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08423/) (2017)
- [Dreaming to Distill: Data-free Knowledge Transfer via DeepInversion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08795/) (2019)
- [Agentless: Demystifying LLM-based Software Engineering Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01489/) (2024)
- [Label-Only Membership Inference Attacks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14321/) (2020)
- [MLAgentBench: Evaluating Language Agents on Machine Learning Experimentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03302/) (2023)
- [Formalizing and Benchmarking Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12815/) (2023)
- [Systematic Evaluation of Privacy Risks of Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.10595/) (2020)
- [Enhanced Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09679/) (2021)
- [RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17134/) (2024)
- [High Accuracy and High Fidelity Extraction of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01838/) (2019)
- [Information Leakage in Embedding Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00053/) (2020)
- [Large Language Model-Based Agents for Software Engineering: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02977/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Automated Membership Inference Attacks (AutoMIA): Discovering MIA Signal Computations using LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19375/) (2026)
- [AutoMIA: Improved Baselines for Membership Inference Attack via Agentic Self-Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01014/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Inference attacks have been widely studied and offer a systematic risk assessment of ML services; however, their implementation and the attack parameters for optimal estimation are challenging for non-experts. The emergence of advanced large language models presents a promising yet largely unexplored opportunity to develop autonomous agents as inference attack experts, helping address this challenge. In this paper, we propose AttackPilot, an autonomous agent capable of independently conducting inference attacks without human intervention. We evaluate it on 20 target services. The evaluation shows that our agent, using GPT-4o, achieves a 100.0% task completion rate and near-expert attack performance, with an average token cost of only 0.627 per run. The agent can also be powered by many other representative LLMs and can adaptively optimize its strategy under service constraints. We further perform trace analysis, demonstrating that design choices, such as a multi-agent framework and task-specific action spaces, effectively mitigate errors such as bad plans, inability to follow instructions, task context loss, and hallucinations. We anticipate that such agents could empower non-expert ML service providers, auditors, or regulators to systematically assess the risks of ML services without requiring deep domain expertise.
