Google's AI Red Team: the Ethical Hackers Making AI Safer

 Interesting piece.

Google's AI Red Team: the ethical hackers making AI safer

July 19, 2023, 3 min read

Today, we're publishing information on Google’s AI Red Team for the first time.

Daniel Fabian, Head of Google Red Teams

Last month, we introduced the Secure AI Framework (SAIF), designed to help address risks to AI systems and drive security standards for the technology in a responsible manner.

To build on this momentum, today, we’re publishing a new report to explore one critical capability that we deploy to support SAIF: red teaming. We believe that red teaming will play a decisive role in preparing every organization for attacks on AI systems and look forward to working together to help everyone utilize AI in a secure way. The report examines our work to stand up a dedicated AI Red Team and includes three important areas: 1) what red teaming in the context of AI systems is and why it is important; 2) what types of attacks AI red teams simulate; and 3) lessons we have learned that we can share with others.

What is red teaming?

Google Red Team consists of a team of hackers that simulate a variety of adversaries, ranging from nation states and well-known Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups to hacktivists, individual criminals or even malicious insiders. The term came from the military, and described activities where a designated team would play an adversarial role (the “Red Team”) against the “home” team.

For a closer look at Google’s security Red Team, watch the above video.

Over the past decade, we’ve evolved our approach to translate the concept of red teaming to the latest innovations in technology, including AI. The AI Red Team is closely aligned with traditional red teams, but also has the necessary AI subject matter expertise to carry out complex technical attacks on AI systems. To ensure that they are simulating realistic adversary activities, our team leverages the latest insights from world class Google Threat Intelligence teams like Mandiant and the Threat Analysis Group (TAG), content abuse red teaming in Trust & Safety, and research into the latest attacks from Google DeepMind. .... '