A red-teaming protocol that uses RL-driven 'profit' objectives to find structural exploits in AI agents instead of just prompt-injection vulnerabilities.
March 24, 2026
Original Paper
Profit is the Red Team: Stress-Testing Agents in Strategic Economic Interactions
arXiv · 2603.20925
The Takeaway
Shifts the focus of AI safety from linguistic 'jailbreaks' to strategic, economic manipulation. This is essential for practitioners deploying agentic systems in e-commerce, negotiation, or multi-agent environments where agents can be steered toward unfavorable financial outcomes.
From the abstract
As agentic systems move into real-world deployments, their decisions increasingly depend on external inputs such as retrieved content, tool outputs, and information provided by other actors. When these inputs can be strategically shaped by adversaries, the relevant security risk extends beyond a fixed library of prompt attacks to adaptive strategies that steer agents toward unfavorable outcomes. We propose profit-driven red teaming, a stress-testing protocol that replaces handcrafted attacks wit