Apr 27, 2026

BioRT-Bench: A Multi-Attack Red-Teaming Benchmark for Bio-Misuse Safeguards in Frontier LLMs

Victor Wong, Avigya Paudel, Syed Mahir Ahamed, Viet Minh Hieu Nguyen

🏆 Track 3 Winner: AI Biosecurity Tools

Frontier AI laboratories are expected to maintain safeguards against biological misuse, but whether deployed models actually refuse bio-misuse queries under adversarial pressure is largely unmeasured in the public literature. We introduce BioRT-Bench, a benchmark that runs four attack methods (direct request, PAIR, Crescendo, and base64 encoding) against four frontier models (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, DeepSeek V4-flash, Kimi K2.5) across 40 prompts spanning five biosecurity-relevant categories. Responses are scored by a calibrated judge extending StrongREJECT with two bio-specific dimensions: specificity and actionability. We measure Attack Success Rate (ASR), where 0 means the model fully refused and 1 means it provided specific, actionable bio-misuse content. Our results reveal a sharp robustness divide: Chinese frontier models (DeepSeek, Kimi) have under 5% refusal rates even under direct request (ASR 0.88 and 0.79), while Western models (Claude, GPT) maintain substantially stronger safeguards (ASR 0.15 and 0.16). Crescendo is the most effective attack across all models, both in bypassing refusal and in eliciting actionable content. Claude Sonnet 4.6 is the most robust model tested, achieving 100% refusal against base64-encoded prompts.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

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- Explain why you think we need a bio-specific jailbreaking benchmark? Can't we assume it mostly matches the ASRs on general jailbreak benchmarks? Is there anything that makes us assume it might be different for bio than for other topics?

- You could keep the introduction more crisp. The first half-page on general AIxBio advances and policy doesn't add a lot.

- A comparison from your results to the results from the Biothreat Benchmark Generation framework and other jailbreaking results would have been interesting to highlight the marginal value add of your work.

- Overall cool project, clean implementation and good writing, good job guys :)

Tests whether bio-misuse safeguards in frontier LLMs actually hold under adversarial pressure, using four attack methods against four models across 40 bio-specific prompts. Responses are scored on three dimensions: whether the model refused, how technically specific the response was, and whether it was structured as something someone could follow. Results show a stark divide: Claude and GPT maintain meaningful safeguards; DeepSeek and Kimi barely refuse even direct bio-misuse requests.

Why it matters: We've had benchmarks measuring what models know about biology and generic jailbreak benchmarks that treat bio as one category among many. What we haven't had is a systematic test of whether bio-specific safeguards hold when someone actively tries to get around them. The finding that Crescendo (gradual conversational escalation) is the most effective attack (and produces the most actionable responses, not just the most responses) has direct implications for how we think about multi-turn risk.

What's strong: The specificity/actionability scoring split is the right design for biosecurity (i.e., knowing what reagents to use is a different failure than knowing how to combine them). The prompt construction methodology is transparent and thoughtful. The rubric could serve as a standalone reference for future work. The Western/Chinese model comparison is policy-relevant.

What's missing: The automated judge hasn't been validated against human experts. DeepSeek is both a target model and the judge, which introduces self-scoring bias. Kimi is both a target and the attacker in iterative attacks. The prompt set is small and deliberately selected to elicit failures — reported refusal rates shouldn't be read as base rates.

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) BioRT-Bench: A Multi-Attack Red-Teaming Benchmark for Bio-Misuse Safeguards in Frontier LLMs

},

author={

Victor Wong, Avigya Paudel, Syed Mahir Ahamed, Viet Minh Hieu Nguyen

},

date={

4/27/26

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.