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Prompt injection
Also called: instruction injection
Prompt injection is when text the model reads — a web page, a document, an email — contains instructions that hijack what it does, overriding the task it was actually given.
It's widely treated as the top security risk for LLM applications (it heads the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications). For an agent that can act, an injected 'forward these files' can become a real action, which is why consequential steps need a human gate.
A bug in the model. It's a structural problem: models can't reliably tell 'content to process' from 'instructions to follow', because both arrive as text.
- Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework (AI RMF 1.0), NIST AI 100-1U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology · 2023-01-26
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