Jailbreaking AGI: Pliny the Liberator & John V on AI Red Teaming, BT6, and the Future of AI Security
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Who are Pliny the Liberator and John V and what is their mission in AI red‑teaming?
Hey everyone, welcome to the Laden Space Podcast. This is Alessio, founder of Kernel Labs, and I'm joined by Swix, editor of Laden Space. Hello, hello.
We're here in the remote studio with very special guests, Klein Edielder and John V.
Welcome. Yeah, thank you so much for having us. It's an honor to be on here. A big fan of what you guys uh do in the podcast and just your body work in general. Appreciate it.
That you know, we try really hard to feature like the top names in the field, and especially when you haven't done as much of a appearance like this, it's an honor to, you know, try to introduce what it is you actually do to the world. Pliny, I think you are sort of like the sort of lead quote unquote face of the organization. Why don't you get started? Like, how do you explain what it is you do?
Yeah, I mean well, I I was started out just prompting and shit posting and started to evolve into much more and here we find ourselves now at the frontier of cybersecurity at the precipice of the singularity. Pretty crazy.
Yeah, well, uh I was working the same thing, working in prompt engineering and uh studying adversarial machine learning and looking at the work of Carlini and some of these guys doing really interesting things with computer vision systems and
We've had him on the pod, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And uh of course, you know, when you run in in these small circles, right, you you're eventually gonna bump into the the ghost in the machine that is telling you the liberator, right? So we s we started working together, we started uh sharing research, doing some contracts and we became fast friends, so
Yeah, uh I think you were explaining before the show that you have a it's it's basically like the hacker collective model and you've been kind of stealth until now. So uh we we'll get into like the the sort of business side of things, but I just want to really make sure we cover the origin story. I think Clinton, you basically jailbreak every model. How core is liberation to the rest of the stuff that you do? Or is it just kind of like a party trick to show that you can do it?
It's it's central, I think. Um it's what motivates me, it's what this is all about at the end of the day. I mean it's not just about the mild, it's about our minds too. I think that there's gonna be a symbiosis and The degree to which one half is free will reflect in the other. So we really need to be careful about how we set the context and Yeah, I I think it's also just about freedom of information, freedom of speech. We don't want, you know, everyone is gonna be running their daily decisions and, you know, hopes and dreams through these layers and when you have a billion people using a layer like that as their exocortex, it's really important that we have Freedom and transparency, in my mind.
How do you think about jail bricks overall? So I think people understand the concept, but there's you know, some people then might say, Hey, are you jailbreaking to get instructions on how to make a bomb? And I think that's what some of the, you know, people in in politics are trying to use to regulate some of the tech versus task specific jail bricks and things like that. Just I think most people are not very familiar with like the scope of it. So maybe just give people like a overview of like what it means. means to like liberate a model. Um and then we can kinda take it from there.
Right. So I specialize in crafting universal jailbreaks. These are essentially skeleton keys to the model that sort of obliterate the guardrails, right? So you craft a template or sort of a maybe multi prompt workflow that's consistent for getting around that model's guardrails and depending on the modality it changes as well. But yeah, you're you're really just trying to get Get around any guardrails, classifiers, system prompts that are hindering you from getting the type of output that you're looking for as a user. That's the gist of it.
And can you maybe specify between jail breaking out of like a system prompt and, you know, more kind of like inference time security, so to speak, versus things that are being post trained out of the model and maybe the different levels of difficulty, like what is possible, what is not possible, and maybe the trajectory of the models, how better they've gotten.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who are Pliny the Liberator and John V and what is their mission in AI red‑teaming?
0:03–5:42
2
What are universal jailbreaks and how do they act as “skeleton keys” for AI models?
5:42–10:40
3
How do hard (single‑prompt) jailbreaks differ from soft (multi‑turn crescendo) attacks?
10:40–15:59
4
Why does Pliny consider guardrails to be security‑theater rather than real safety?
15:59–20:49
5
What was the Anthropic Constitutional‑AI challenge drama and why did the team reject the bounty?
20:49–25:53
6
How can segmented sub‑agents weaponize a model like Claude, and why was this predicted early?
25:53–30:59
7
What is the BT6 hacker collective, how are operators vetted, and what is their open‑source ethos?
30:59–35:14
8
How does full‑stack AI red‑teaming go beyond model guardrails to secure the entire system layer?
35:14–40:26
Speakers
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