Red teaming

• Before major launches or model upgrades.
• After adding new tools, data sources, or permissions.
• On a recurring cadence for high-risk surfaces.

Red teaming reveals failure modes and informs guardrail priorities. PMs set scope, success criteria, and remediation SLAs. It requires time and budget, but reduces incident risk and speeds security approvals.

Define threat models (prompt injection, data exfiltration, harmful content). Use a mix of automated probes and human experts. Track findings, fixes, and re-tests. In 2026, integrate red-team suites into CI for critical intents and run post-incident drills quarterly.

A quarterly red team found an injection path through RAG citations. Fixing it before launch avoided a potential data leak and shortened an enterprise security review from 3 weeks to 5 days.

• Treating red teaming as one-off instead of continuous.
• Not prioritizing fixes, letting known issues linger.
• Lacking telemetry to reproduce findings.