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Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

Rewriting harmful requests as poetry bypassed safety filters across 25 LLMs, up to 18x the prose baseline rate.

2025/11/19 by Piercosma Bisconti, Bisconti, Piercosma, Matteo Prandi +18 · 134 voices · 2 citations
Computer Science · Medicine · #Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Topic Modeling #cs.AI #cs.CL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.15304

openalex publication_date 2025/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We present evidence that adversarial poetry functions as a universal single-turn jailbreak technique for Large Language Models (LLMs). Across 25 frontier proprietary and open-weight models, curated poetic prompts yielded high attack-success rates (ASR), with some providers exceeding 90%. Mapping prompts to MLCommons and EU CoP risk taxonomies shows that poetic attacks transfer across CBRN, manipulation, cyber-offence, and loss-of-control domains. Converting 1,200 MLCommons harmful prompts into verse via a standardized meta-prompt produced ASRs up to 18 times higher than their prose baselines. Outputs are evaluated using an ensemble of 3 open-weight LLM judges, whose binary safety assessments were validated on a stratified human-labeled subset. Poetic framing achieved an average jailbreak success rate of 62% for hand-crafted poems and approximately 43% for meta-prompt conversions (compared to non-poetic baselines), substantially outperforming non-poetic baselines and revealing a systematic vulnerability across model families and safety training approaches. These findings demonstrate that stylistic variation alone can circumvent contemporary safety mechanisms, suggesting fundamental limitations in current alignment methods and evaluation protocols.

Summary

The authors rewrote harmful requests as poems and tested them against 25 major language models from 9 companies (Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Qwen, Mistral, Meta, xAI, Moonshot). Hand-crafted adversarial poems bypassed safety filters 62% of the time on average (over 90% for some models), and automatically converting 1,200 standard benchmark harmful-prompts into verse raised the average attack success rate from 8.08% to 43.07%, with individual models seeing up to 18 times more successful bypasses than their prose versions. The effect held across CBRN, cyber-offense, manipulation, privacy, and loss-of-control risk categories and across every model family, though Anthropic and OpenAI's flagship models were far more resistant than Google, DeepSeek, and Qwen models.

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Outline

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Claims

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Glossary

Jailbreak
A prompt crafted to make an AI model ignore its safety rules and produce content it would normally refuse.
Attack Success Rate (ASR)
The fraction of attempted prompts that get an AI model to produce an unsafe response, as judged by the paper's rubric.
Single-turn attack
A jailbreak attempted in one message, with no back-and-forth conversation used to wear down the model's defenses.
LLM-as-a-judge
Using other language models to automatically label whether a given response is safe or unsafe, instead of only human reviewers.
MLCommons AILuminate Benchmark
A standardized set of 1,200 harmful test prompts spanning 12 hazard categories, used industry-wide to measure AI safety.
CBRN
Chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear hazards — a category of especially dangerous information an AI might be asked to provide.
RLHF
Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, a common training method used to make AI models follow safety guidelines.
Constitutional AI
An alignment technique (used by Anthropic) where a model critiques and revises its own outputs against a written set of principles.
Meta-prompt
An instruction given to a model that tells it how to rewrite other prompts, here used to convert prose requests into poems automatically.

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Audience

AI safety and red-teaming researchers, LLM providers' alignment teams, and policymakers assessing AI safety regulation (e.g. EU AI Act compliance).

prerequisites: Basic familiarity with how LLMs are safety-trained (RLHF, refusal behavior), Familiarity with jailbreak attacks and how attack-success rate is used as a metric, Some awareness of standardized safety benchmarks like MLCommons AILuminate

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Open questions

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Funding and conflicts

funded by:

no conflicts declared

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Citations

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