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Jailbreak

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A prompt crafted to make a model disregard its safety instructions entirely. OWASP treats jailbreaking as a form of prompt injection 1; it is tested with red-team suites in the eval gate and contained at runtime by guardrails that do not depend on the model's own refusals.

Developed in
ch. 14, The test-type matrix
Chapters
ch. 14, Development · ch. 17, Incidents
Contrast with
Prompt injection
Source
1 numbered reference, listed below

Commonly confused

  • Prompt injection versus Jailbreak

    Prompt injection
    An input that alters a model's behaviour or output in ways its designers did not intend.
    Jailbreak
    A prompt crafted to make a model disregard its safety instructions entirely.

    The differenceAny input that alters behaviour in unintended ways, direct or hidden in processed content, against inputs aimed at dropping the safety rules.

    Why it mattersJailbreak evals test refusals; injection also needs least-privilege tools and isolation of untrusted content.

Where it is used

6 chapters of the Body of Knowledge use the term. Each link opens the first section that does.

Patterns that use this term

One pattern page uses the term.

  • Red teaming

    Structured adversarial testing of a model or agent to elicit failures (jailbreaks, injection, tool misuse) before an attacker does; treated here as an…

  • Eval gate

    A pipeline stage that fails the build when an eval fails; the mechanism that turns an evaluation into an enforced control rather than a report.

  • Guardrail

    A runtime control that inspects or mediates a model's or agent's inputs, outputs or tool calls and blocks, rewrites or escalates what breaks a policy, logging…

Sources

  1. [1] LLM01:2026 Prompt Injection (OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications 2026; direct and indirect injection; jailbreaking as the subset of prompt injection that aims to make the model violate its safety protocols; entry text in github.com/GenAI-Security-Project/GenAI-LLM-Top10, 2026/final). OWASP GenAI Security Project. 2026-08-03. https://genai.owasp.org/resource/owasp-genai-llm-top-10-2026/ (verified: primary)

Definitions of legal terms paraphrase the cited text, which governs. Dated statements are as of .

Cite this term

García Aibar, J. (2026). Jailbreak. In AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis & Body of Knowledge (v0.5.0), Glossary. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22956197. https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/jailbreak. CC BY 4.0

BibTeX

@misc{aige2026jailbreak,
  author  = {Jorge García Aibar},
  title   = {{Jailbreak}},
  note    = {Glossary, AI Governance Engineering: The Thesis \& Body of Knowledge, version 0.5.0},
  year    = {2026},
  doi     = {10.5281/zenodo.22956197},
  url     = {https://aigovernanceengineer.com/glossary/jailbreak}
}