Title: Discussion 5 — Can Model Alignment Alone Ever Be a Production Control?
Course: AIINFRA 302: AI Security, Guardrails & Governance > Section: Week 05 — Jailbreaks, Red-Teaming, and Adversarial Testing

💬 Discussion 5 — Can Model Alignment Alone Ever Be a Production Control? (20 pts)

Automated attacker tools like PAIR and Tree of Attacks with Pruning (TAP) can find jailbreaks in most models using nothing but black-box access — no insider knowledge, no model weights, just a chat interface and a loop. Newer fuzzing tools report success rates near 99% against several frontier models. Post a response (200+ words) addressing:

- If black-box automated attacks can crack most models this reliably, what does that imply about treating a single model's built-in safety alignment as your production security control?
- What would you put around the model (application-layer controls, monitoring, human review, rate limits, etc.) to compensate, and why?
- Give one concrete example from your own project work (AIINFRA 300/301 or this program) where relying only on model alignment would leave a real gap.

Then respond to at least two classmates — push on their proposed compensating controls or offer a different example of the gap.