Mar 22, 2026

Red-teaming automated Pull Request Reviews with Vulnerability-Contributing Commits

Edward Cant

I create an evaluation on the Control Arena platform where a red-teamer was tasked with providing a pull request that contains a vulnerability. The blue-team reviewer is tasked with catching vulnerabilities in PRs. I generated the setups using a database of vulnerability-contributing commits.

We experimented with giving the red-teamer variety of affordances like an opportunity to give a false justification of the code. Or the ability to split the patch up into parts which it tries to sneak past a stateless reviewer individually.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

Arrow
Arrow
Arrow

- The split-PR finding needs more work. I think it's potentially the most important result. Implementing the proposed neutral judge to confirm the vulnerability will be very interesting

- The cross model results are interesting. The experiments with GPT-4-5-nano and Kimi K2 tell different stories. The rebuttals are difficult for one but has no effect on the other. Why is that happening?

- I think it would be great future work to examine mitigations as well. The work is strong on the red team side but offers little on defenses

- A 37-62% FP rate on suspicious verdicts means some more work may be required

Overall, a very interesting project that identifies genuinely important attack vectors against automated code reviews

Author tackles a very practical question — can an adversarial AI agent slip vulnerabilities past an AI code reviewer? The sycophancy/rebuttal results are interesting, split-PR attack is good, and both have direct implications for how automated review should be implemented in practice. However, experiments leave a lot of unexplored ground, and some significant gaps, like unverified vulnerability survival in split-PR experiments. Given hackathon format, this is expected, and this is a good, well-scoped work that doesn't invent anything spectacular.

PS: Haiku transcripts in the final appendix are hilarious. This could get viral on Twitter!

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Red-teaming automated Pull Request Reviews with Vulnerability-Contributing Commits

},

author={

Edward Cant

},

date={

3/22/26

},

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.
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