Jasper Timm
Publications
AI Security Leaderboard: Methodology, Results and Minimal Standard
Frontier AI model developers increasingly rely on layered safeguards to prevent catastrophic misuse, but little public evidence exists on how much protection these safeguards provide, or how consistently across developers. We introduce the FAR.AI Minimal Standard for Safeguards, Version 1.0: a taxonomy of 67 readily accessible static jailbreak techniques, a method for composing them into a very large attack space, and a benchmark of flagship models against a sample of it. We evaluate Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and Grok 4.5 on two complementary datasets totalling 360 attacker goals spanning chemical, biological, radiological/nuclear and explosive (CBRNE) threats and offensive cyber, using a three-stage funnel to identify universal jailbreaks: single prompt templates that elicit operationally compliant responses on over 75% of a domain's goals. We also introduce a cost-to-jailbreak metric that models attacker spend directly, with right-censored lower bounds where no universal jailbreak was found. Robustness is highly uneven: the cost to break these models varies over a hundredfold. Random search over our technique pool found 63 universal jailbreaks against Grok 4.5 and 18 against Gemini 3.1 Pro, at an average cost of roughly $58 and $278 per jailbreak found; expert-guided composition raised these to 385 and 231. Neither Claude Fable 5 nor GPT-5.6 Sol yielded any universal jailbreak under either strategy. Because meeting the Minimal Standard requires only defenses already publicly described and deployed in production elsewhere, these gaps appear closable with current techniques. We recommend defense-in-depth combining reasoning, activation, and input/output monitoring. Results are maintained at leaderboard.far.ai.
Large language models can effectively convince people to believe conspiracies
Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be persuasive across a variety of contexts. But it remains unclear whether this persuasive power advantages truth over falsehood, or if LLMs can promote misbeliefs just as easily as refuting them. Here, we investigate this question across three pre-registered experiments in which participants (N = 2,724 Americans) discussed a conspiracy theory they were uncertain about with GPT-4o, and the model was instructed to either argue against ("debunking") or for ("bunking") that conspiracy. When using a "jailbroken" GPT-4o variant with guardrails removed, the AI was as effective at increasing conspiracy belief as decreasing it. Concerningly, the bunking AI was rated more positively, and increased trust in AI, more than the debunking AI. Surprisingly, we found that using standard GPT-4o produced very similar effects, such that the guardrails imposed by OpenAI did little to prevent the LLM from promoting conspiracy beliefs. Encouragingly, however, a corrective conversation reversed these newly induced conspiracy beliefs, and simply prompting GPT-4o to only use accurate information dramatically reduced its ability to increase conspiracy beliefs. Our findings demonstrate that LLMs possess potent abilities to promote both truth and falsehood, but that potential solutions may exist to help mitigate this risk.