AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research

The article discusses a notable imbalance in AI security research, where studies on attacking AI systems outnumber those on defending them. It highlights that this skew is evident across various subfields such as federated learning, speech recognition, membership inference, and large language models. The authors argue that attack papers often benefit from favorable evaluation conditions, whereas defense papers face stricter standards, resulting in a literature rich in vulnerabilities but lacking robust, deployable protections.