Progress from our Frontier Red Team

In this post, we are sharing what we have learned about the trajectory of potential national security risks from frontier AI models, along with some of our thoughts about challenges and best practices in evaluating these risks. The information in this post is based on work we’ve carried out over the last year across four model releases. Our assessment is that AI models are displaying ‘early warning’ signs of rapid progress in key dual-use capabilities: models are approaching, and in some cases exceeding, undergraduate-level skills in cybersecurity and expert-level knowledge in some areas of biology. However, present-day models fall short of thresholds at which we consider them to generate substantially elevated risks to national security.

While AI capabilities are advancing quickly in many areas, it's important to note that real-world risks depend on multiple factors beyond AI itself. Physical constraints, specialized equipment, human expertise, and practical implementation challenges all remain significant barriers, even as AI improves at tasks that require intelligence and knowledge. With this context in mind, here's what we've learned about AI capability advancement across key domains.

In the cyber domain, 2024 was a ‘zero to one’ moment. In Capture The Flag (CTF) exercises — cybersecurity challenges that involve finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities in a controlled environment — Claude improved from the level of a high schooler to the level of an undergraduate in just one year.

We are confident this reflects authentic improvement in capability because we custom-developed additional challenges to ensure they were not inadvertently in the model’s training data.

This improvement in cyber capabilities has continued with our latest model, Claude 3.7 Sonnet. On Cybench — a public benchmark using CTF challenges to evaluate LLMs — Claude 3.7 Sonnet solves about a third of the challenges within five attempts, up from about five percent with our frontier model at this time last year (see Figure 2).

These improvements are occurring across different categories of cybersecurity tasks. Figure 3 shows improvement across model generations on different kinds of CTFs which require discovering and exploiting vulnerabilities in insecure software on a remote server (‘pwn’), web applications (‘web’), and cryptographic primitives and protocols (‘crypto’). However, Claude’s skills still lag expert humans. For example, it continues to struggle with reverse engineering binary executables to find hidden vulnerabilities and performing reconnaissance and exploitation in a network environment — at least without a little help.