Exploiting Programmatic Behavior of LLMs: Dual-Use Through Standard Security Attacks

Recent advances in instruction-following large language models (LLMs) have led to dramatic improvements in a range of NLP tasks. Unfortunately, we find that the same improved capabilities amplify the dual-use risks for malicious purposes of these models. Dual-use is difficult to prevent as instruction-following capabilities now enable standard attacks from computer security. The capabilities of these instruction-following LLMs provide strong economic incentives for dual-use by malicious actors. In particular, we show that instruction-following LLMs can produce targeted malicious content, including hate speech and scams, bypassing in-the-wild defenses implemented by LLM API vendors. Our analysis shows that this content can be generated economically and at cost of $125-500 \times$ cheaper than human effort alone. Together, our findings suggest that LLMs will increasingly attract more sophisticated adversaries and attacks, and addressing these attacks may require new approaches to mitigations.