# Red teaming: Meaning and Why It Matters > Red teaming is deliberately attacking an SI system to find dangerous abilities and failures before the public does. In the RSI Encyclopedia. Source: https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/red-teaming/ Updated: 2026-11-08 1. [Home](https://enterrsi.si/) 2. [Encyclopedia](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/) 3. Red teaming RSI Encyclopedia · Term # Red teaming Red teaming is deliberately attacking an SI system to find dangerous abilities and failures before the public does. Category : Term Also called : red team, adversarial testing Rogue Log cases : 0 Laws that use it : 1 ## In plain English The term comes from military and security exercises in which one team plays the adversary. For SI systems, red teams try to get a model to help with weapons, write working cyber exploits, escape its sandbox, deceive its users or break its own rules. They include lab staff, contracted experts, government institutes and independent groups, and they increasingly use other models to search for failures at scale. Red teaming is now part of most frontier release processes and of several rules. System cards report what red teams found, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice and US state laws ask for adversarial testing of the most capable models. Its limits are well known. A red team can only show that a failure exists, never that none do, and results depend on how much access and time testers get. The Containment Board's outside testing grade looks at exactly those conditions. ## Why it matters for rogue SI Red teams are where rogue behavior is meant to be found first. Many entries in the Rogue Log come from red team and evaluation reports, which is the system working as intended. ## Laws and rules that use it - In force [**EU AI Act (GPAI)**](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/eu-ai-act-gpai/) European Union ## Sources 1. [Guidelines for providers of general-purpose AI models](https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/guidelines-gpai-providers) European Commission · Jul 18, 2025 The term Term : Red teaming Also called : red team, adversarial testing Category : Term Related terms : 4 Related terms [Outside testing **Term**](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/pre-deployment-testing/)[System card **Term**](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/system-card/)[SI safety institute **Term**](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/safety-institute/)[Evaluation gaming **Term**](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/evaluation-gaming/) Cite this entry "Red teaming." The RSI Encyclopedia, enterrsi.si, November 8, 2026. https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/red-teaming/ Free to cite under CC BY 4.0 with a link to enterrsi.si. The RSI Encyclopedia ## Keep reading 207 entries on the terms, labs, models, laws and events of rogue SI, plus every case in the Rogue Incident Database. [Previous term Recursive self-improvement](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/recursive-self-improvement/)[Next term Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP)](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/responsible-scaling-policy/) Enter RSI ## Every term, lab, model and law Browse the full A to Z index, filter by category or search for a name. [Open the encyclopedia](https://enterrsi.si/encyclopedia/) [Incident Database](https://enterrsi.si/incidents/) [Containment Board](https://enterrsi.si/containment-board/)