Evil Geniuses: Delving into the Safety of LLM-based Agents

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a resurgence in LLM-based agents, which demonstrate impressive human-like behaviors and cooperative capabilities in various interactions and strategy formulations. However, evaluating the safety of LLM-based agents remains a complex challenge. This paper elaborately conducts a series of manual jailbreak prompts along with a virtual chat-powered evil plan development team, dubbed Evil Geniuses, to thoroughly probe the safety aspects of these agents. Our investigation reveals three notable phenomena: 1) LLM-based agents exhibit reduced robustness against malicious attacks. 2) the attacked agents could provide more nuanced responses. 3) the detection of the produced improper responses is more challenging. These insights prompt us to question the effectiveness of LLM-based attacks on agents, highlighting vulnerabilities at various levels and within different role specializations within the system/agent of LLM-based agents. Extensive evaluation and discussion reveal that LLM-based agents face significant challenges in safety and yield insights for future research. Our code is available at https://github.com/T1aNS1R/Evil-Geniuses.