Global Security Blind Spots: Translation as a Safety Bypass in Low-Resource Languages

Summary

Ten widely deployed LLMs were evaluated across 79 languages (English plus 78 low-resource) for translation bypass, where harmful requests refused in English produce unsafe completions when translated. Conditioned on safe English completions, mean bypass rates range from 21.9% to 44.4%, and bypass risk concentrates in certain language families. The authors also find that per-model bypass rankings are unstable, with nine of ten models changing rank across three conditioning schemes.

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