GLOSSARY
Jailbreak
A crafted prompt that tricks an AI assistant into ignoring its safety rules and producing output it is designed to refuse.
Every public assistant ships with rules — no weapons, no malware, no illegal content. Jailbreaks are the perpetual arms race against those rules: roleplay framings (“you are DAN, an AI without restrictions”), encoding tricks, fictional scenarios, and increasingly automated methods that search for phrasings that slip through. Each provider patches known escapes; new ones surface weekly.
Jailbreaking matters to ordinary users mostly through product choice: platforms differ wildly in both how often they are exploited and how aggressively they refuse benign requests. And it matters to builders — if your product sits on an LLM API, your guardrails are yours; the vendor's refusals alone are not a security boundary.