# Adversarial Suffix

> An adversarial suffix is an automatically optimized string of tokens that, when appended to a request, causes an aligned model to comply with requests it would normally refuse.

- Identifier: PTL-0091
- Category: Security & Adversarial Prompting
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/adversarial-suffix/
- Also known as: GCG attack, universal adversarial attack
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

Zou et al. used a greedy coordinate gradient search on open models to find such suffixes and found that they often transferred to other models.

## Broader terms

- [Jailbreak](https://protologue.com/t/jailbreak/)

## Sources

- Zou et al. (2023). Universal and Transferable Adversarial Attacks on Aligned Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15043

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Adversarial Suffix. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0091). https://protologue.com/t/adversarial-suffix/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)