  When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in
mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate
content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that
may contribute to harm to individuals or society. This principle applies to
both normal and adversarial use. In response, we introduce ALERT, a large-scale
benchmark to assess safety based on a novel fine-grained risk taxonomy. It is
designed to evaluate the safety of LLMs through red teaming methodologies and
consists of more than 45k instructions categorized using our novel taxonomy. By
subjecting LLMs to adversarial testing scenarios, ALERT aims to identify
vulnerabilities, inform improvements, and enhance the overall safety of the
language models. Furthermore, the fine-grained taxonomy enables researchers to
perform an in-depth evaluation that also helps one to assess the alignment with
various policies. In our experiments, we extensively evaluate 10 popular open-
and closed-source LLMs and demonstrate that many of them still struggle to
attain reasonable levels of safety.
