# What is red teaming for an AI system?

> Red teaming is deliberately trying to break an AI system the way an attacker would, before they do, to find the failure nobody tested.

Source: https://meshin.co/glossary/red-teaming
Updated: 2026-09-08

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## Why it comes up

Boards and security reviewers increasingly ask for it by name, rather than accepting "we ran evals" as a full answer. An eval suite built by the same team that built the system tends to test what that team already expected to go wrong. It matters more, not less, once a system can take actions or read outside content. A missed failure then moves from a bad reply to a completed action.

## What to do about it

Budget real time, not an afternoon, for someone to actively try prompt injection, data extraction and off-limits requests. Do it against the actual live system, not a sanitised demo. Write down exactly what broke, and fix the underlying guardrail, not just the one example that happened to get tried. I treat this as part of shipping in the [90-Day Production Sprint](/services/90-day-production-sprint), folding findings back into the eval suite before launch.