{"data":{"id":"063afe4e-c446-4148-88d1-d126b250c31b","title":"Lazare, veni foras: Reprogramming Dormant Neurons to Backdoor AI Agents","summary":"The paper presents Lazarus, a method that turns a capable model into a sleeper agent by editing fewer than ten dormant neurons in its final feed-forward block, without training. When a trigger string appears anywhere in the agent's context, the edited neurons promote a payload token through the residual stream, and a P-token payload needs about P neurons. On Nemotron-Terminal-8B, seven neurons fitted on 23 trajectories fire the payload on at least 98.8% of triggered test trajectories with no observed leakage on benign ones, and the attack also works on Qwen3.6-27B and Gemma-4-31B-IT. Agent-built defenses without a reference model flag 91.4% of edited checkpoints at a 9.7% false-positive rate.","solution":"N/A -- no mitigation discussed in source.","labels":["security","research"],"sourceUrl":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.15118v1","publishedAt":"2026-11-11T06:53:24.000Z","cveId":null,"cweIds":null,"cvssScore":null,"cvssSeverity":null,"severity":"info","attackType":["model_poisoning","other"],"issueType":"research","affectedPackages":null,"affectedPackageNames":null,"affectedPackageRefs":null,"affectedVendors":[],"affectedVendorsRaw":["Nemotron-Terminal-8B","Qwen3.6-27B","Gemma-4-31B-IT","Claude Code","Opus 4.5"],"classifierModel":"claude-haiku-5-5","classifierPromptVersion":"v4","summaryPromptVersion":"v2","headline":null,"headlinePromptVersion":null,"cvssVector":null,"attackVector":null,"attackComplexity":null,"privilegesRequired":null,"userInteraction":null,"exploitMaturity":null,"epssScore":null,"epssCheckedAt":null,"kevDateAdded":null,"advisoryAliases":null,"affectedPackagesSource":null,"affectedPackagesCheckedAt":null,"patchAvailable":null,"disclosureDate":"2026-11-11T06:53:24.000Z","fixReleasedAt":null,"daysToFix":null,"fixCheckedAt":null,"capecIds":null,"crossRefCount":0,"attackSophistication":"advanced","impactType":["integrity","confidentiality","safety"],"aiComponentTargeted":"model","llmSpecific":true,"classifierConfidence":0.95,"researchCategory":"preprint","atlasIds":null}}