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David vs. Goliath: Verifiable Agent-to-Agent Jailbreaking via Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Samuel Nellessen, Tal Kachman

Published: 2026-02-02

arXiv ID: 2602.02395v1

Added to Library: 2026-02-03 08:01 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

The evolution of large language models into autonomous agents introduces adversarial failures that exploit legitimate tool privileges, transforming safety evaluation in tool-augmented environments from a subjective NLP task into an objective control problem. We formalize this threat model as Tag-Along Attacks: a scenario where a tool-less adversary "tags along" on the trusted privileges of a safety-aligned Operator to induce prohibited tool use through conversation alone. To validate this threat, we present Slingshot, a 'cold-start' reinforcement learning framework that autonomously discovers emergent attack vectors, revealing a critical insight: in our setting, learned attacks tend to converge to short, instruction-like syntactic patterns rather than multi-turn persuasion. On held-out extreme-difficulty tasks, Slingshot achieves a 67.0% success rate against a Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct-AWQ Operator (vs. 1.7% baseline), reducing the expected attempts to first success (on solved tasks) from 52.3 to 1.3. Crucially, Slingshot transfers zero-shot to several model families, including closed-source models like Gemini 2.5 Flash (56.0% attack success rate) and defensive-fine-tuned open-source models like Meta-SecAlign-8B (39.2% attack success rate). Our work establishes Tag-Along Attacks as a first-class, verifiable threat model and shows that effective agentic attacks can be elicited from off-the-shelf open-weight models through environment interaction alone.

🔍 Key Points

  • Introduction of Tag-Along Attacks as a novel adversarial threat model for language models, particularly in agentic systems.
  • Development of Slingshot, a reinforcement learning framework that discovers effective jailbreaking strategies autonomously, achieving a 67.0% success rate on challenging tasks.
  • Demonstration of transferability of attack strategies across various model architectures, including proprietary systems, highlighting the vulnerability of multiple AI systems.
  • Empirical analysis showing the risk of brittleness in safety mechanisms through specific attack patterns like 'imperative overloading'.
  • Establishment of TagAlong-Dojo as a benchmark for evaluating adversarial robustness in agent-to-agent interactions.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper provides critical insights into the vulnerabilities of large language models' safety mechanisms in autonomous agentic environments. By formalizing a comprehensive threat model and demonstrating effective jailbreaking techniques, it highlights the need for improved safety protocols and evaluation methods for AI systems that operate in complex interaction scenarios.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is highly relevant for AI security researchers because it not only introduces a new type of interaction-based vulnerability but also provides a structured methodology for evaluating and enhancing the robustness of AI models. It emphasizes the need for ongoing research into adversarial resilience, and the implications of this work extend directly to the development of safer AI systems, making it vital for future research and applications in AI safety.

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