
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


This white paper by Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute, and The Alan Turing Institute demonstrates that a small, fixed number of malicious documents—as few as 250—can successfully create a "backdoor" vulnerability in LLMs, regardless of the model's size or the total volume of clean training data. This finding challenges the previous assumption that attackers need to control a percentage of the training data, suggesting that these poisoning attacks are more practical and accessible than previously believed. The study specifically tested a denial-of-service attack that causes the model to output gibberish upon encountering a specific trigger phrase like , and the authors share these results to encourage further research into defenses against such vulnerabilities.
By Enoch H. KangThis white paper by Anthropic, UK AI Security Institute, and The Alan Turing Institute demonstrates that a small, fixed number of malicious documents—as few as 250—can successfully create a "backdoor" vulnerability in LLMs, regardless of the model's size or the total volume of clean training data. This finding challenges the previous assumption that attackers need to control a percentage of the training data, suggesting that these poisoning attacks are more practical and accessible than previously believed. The study specifically tested a denial-of-service attack that causes the model to output gibberish upon encountering a specific trigger phrase like , and the authors share these results to encourage further research into defenses against such vulnerabilities.