Decoder. plain-English AI glossary

Red teaming

● Core

Deliberately trying to break an AI — finding the prompts that make it say or do things it shouldn't.

Think of it like

Hiring a burglar to test your locks before a real thief shows up.

Example

A team spends a week trying to get the chatbot to leak its system prompt, produce harmful content, or ignore its guardrails.

How it actually works

Red teamers probe for jailbreaks, harmful outputs, bias, privacy leaks, and edge-case failures — anything the model should refuse but might not. It's both a pre-launch audit and an ongoing practice, because new attack techniques keep emerging.

For product teams

The security audit for AI — find the failures before users do.

For engineers

Adversarial probing for jailbreaks, harmful outputs, bias, and prompt-injection vectors.

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