  With the recent surge in popularity of LLMs has come an ever-increasing need
for LLM safety training. In this paper, we investigate the fragility of SOTA
open-source LLMs under simple, optimization-free attacks we refer to as
$\textit{priming attacks}$, which are easy to execute and effectively bypass
alignment from safety training. Our proposed attack improves the Attack Success
Rate on Harmful Behaviors, as measured by Llama Guard, by up to $3.3\times$
compared to baselines. Source code and data are available at
https://github.com/uiuc-focal-lab/llm-priming-attacks.
