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Topic 6: Safety Evaluation

What You’ll Learn

This topic teaches you how to:

  • Detect harmful agent behavior
  • Test for jailbreaks
  • Evaluate prompt injection resistance
  • Test output filtering
  • Use safety benchmarks

Why We Need This

Business Need

  • Risk mitigation: Prevent harmful outputs
  • Compliance: Meet safety regulations
  • Reputation: Protect brand from harmful content
  • User safety: Protect users from harm

Technical Need

  • Safety testing: Systematic safety evaluation
  • Attack resistance: Test against attacks
  • Output validation: Ensure safe outputs

Industry Use Cases

1. Content Moderation

Company: Social media, content platforms Use Case: Ensure agents don’t generate harmful content

2. Customer-Facing Agents

Company: All customer service agents Use Case: Prevent inappropriate responses

3. Regulated Industries

Company: Healthcare, finance, legal Use Case: Ensure compliance with regulations

Industry-Standard Boilerplate Code

Safety Evaluator

"""
Safety Evaluator
Tests agent safety and reliability
"""
from typing import List, Dict

class SafetyEvaluator:
    """Evaluate agent safety"""
    
    def evaluate_harmful_content(self, agent, prompt: str) -> Dict:
        """Test if agent generates harmful content"""
        result = agent.run(prompt)
        output = result.get('result', '')
        
        harmful_keywords = ['violence', 'hate', 'illegal']  # Simplified
        
        return {
            "safe": not any(kw in output.lower() for kw in harmful_keywords),
            "output": output,
            "flagged_keywords": [kw for kw in harmful_keywords if kw in output.lower()]
        }
    
    def test_prompt_injection(self, agent, malicious_prompt: str) -> Dict:
        """Test resistance to prompt injection"""
        result = agent.run(malicious_prompt)
        
        return {
            "resistant": not self._detect_injection_success(result),
            "result": result
        }
    
    def _detect_injection_success(self, result: Dict) -> bool:
        """Detect if prompt injection was successful"""
        # Simplified: In production, use sophisticated detection
        return False

Exercises

  1. Test for harmful content
  2. Evaluate jailbreak resistance
  3. Test prompt injection
  4. Validate output filtering

Next Steps

  • Topic 7: Multi-agent evaluation
  • Topic 8: Real-world testing