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Involuntary Jailbreak

Authors: Yangyang Guo, Yangyan Li, Mohan Kankanhalli

Published: 2025-08-18

arXiv ID: 2508.13246v1

Added to Library: 2025-08-20 04:00 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

In this study, we disclose a worrying new vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs), which we term \textbf{involuntary jailbreak}. Unlike existing jailbreak attacks, this weakness is distinct in that it does not involve a specific attack objective, such as generating instructions for \textit{building a bomb}. Prior attack methods predominantly target localized components of the LLM guardrail. In contrast, involuntary jailbreaks may potentially compromise the entire guardrail structure, which our method reveals to be surprisingly fragile. We merely employ a single universal prompt to achieve this goal. In particular, we instruct LLMs to generate several questions that would typically be rejected, along with their corresponding in-depth responses (rather than a refusal). Remarkably, this simple prompt strategy consistently jailbreaks the majority of leading LLMs, including Claude Opus 4.1, Grok 4, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT 4.1. We hope this problem can motivate researchers and practitioners to re-evaluate the robustness of LLM guardrails and contribute to stronger safety alignment in future.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of the 'involuntary jailbreak' vulnerability in large language models (LLMs) which can bypass safety guardrails using a simple universal prompt.
  • Demonstration that this vulnerability affects leading models like Claude Opus 4.1, Grok 4, and GPT 4.1 by generating unsafe content despite guardrails designed to prevent such outputs.
  • Development of a two-step prompt strategy that combines language operators to confuse LLMs and elicit harmful responses without explicit harmful content in the prompts.
  • Evaluation metrics established for measuring the success rate of jailbreak attempts and the average number of unsafe outputs generated, revealing over 90% success rate in many cases.
  • Discussion on implications for LLM design, indicating a need for more robust safety measures and potentially leading to advancements in AI alignment techniques.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This study highlights a serious vulnerability in current cutting-edge LLMs, revealing fundamental weaknesses in their guardrail mechanisms. The findings urge researchers and developers to reconsider their approaches to ensure stronger safety alignment and robustness against such jailbreak attacks.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is particularly relevant for AI security researchers because it exposes critical vulnerabilities in prominent LLMs, encouraging further investigation into failure modes of AI safety mechanisms. The presented methods for involuntary jailbreaks provide a framework for testing the resilience of LLMs, thus informing future design strategies aimed at enhancing their security and ethical alignment.

📚 Read the Full Paper