Training & Alignment
Red Teaming
Before others do it: deliberately try to push your own system into misbehaving — jailbreaks, prompt injection, data leakage, embarrassing answers. Good red teams think like attackers and document like accountants. For critical applications this belongs on the calendar repeatedly, not once before launch: every model update shifts the vulnerabilities.
An example
A team systematically tries to get its own customer assistant to make statements it must not make: legally binding commitments, discounts, medical recommendations. Not with tricks from specialist articles, but with what customers really write: persistent follow-ups, emotional accounts, claims about earlier promises. After two days there are eleven cases in which the assistant went too far. All eleven become test cases that run before every release.
A closer look
A group methodically tries to push the system into misbehavior: forbidden information, bypassing the system prompt, data leakage, prompt injection via fed-in documents. The results become fixed test cases.
Why it matters
Red teaming is not a formality, and it is not the same as a penetration test: what is sought is not security holes in the classic sense but inputs on which the system behaves differently than intended. Two things make the difference between ritual and benefit. First, it must be done by someone who didn't build the system, because builders test along their own assumptions. Second, every finding must move into an automated test, otherwise it returns after the next model change.
Commonly misunderstood
Done once at acceptance, it is a snapshot. Every model version and every new tool opens new paths. Red teaming belongs in operations, not in rollout.