Best AI Security Articles: A Curated Reading List
A hand-picked reading list of the best AI security articles, papers, and writeups — covering prompt injection, agent security, red teaming, governance, and incident analysis.
There is no shortage of writing about AI security; there is a serious shortage of writing worth reading more than once. This curated list of the best ai security articles is intentionally short. Each entry is something practitioners on this team have actually used to make a better decision, write a better defense, or explain a real risk to a stakeholder. The list is grouped by what the article is for, not by who published it.
Foundational Reading — Read These First
| Article | Why It Matters | Type |
|---|---|---|
| OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications ↗ | The vocabulary every AI security conversation now uses | Reference |
| Greshake et al., Indirect Prompt Injection (arXiv 2302.12173) ↗ | The paper that named and demonstrated the most important attack class | Research paper |
| Simon Willison’s prompt injection archive ↗ | The single best ongoing chronicle of attack techniques in plain English | Blog series |
| NIST AI 600-1: Generative AI Profile ↗ | The control framework U.S. enterprise procurement is converging on | Government guidance |
If you read nothing else, read these four. The Greshake paper alone reframes how to think about every input an LLM ever sees. Simon Willison’s archive is the closest thing to a real-time threat intel feed for attack techniques.
On Prompt Injection — Attack Side
| Article | What It Adds |
|---|---|
| Anthropic — Many-shot jailbreaking ↗ | Shows how long context windows enable a new class of attack |
| Lakera — Prompt injection attacks handbook | Practical taxonomy of injection patterns seen in production |
| OpenAI — Disrupting deceptive uses of AI ↗ | Lessons from real-world abuse on a major API |
| Kai Greshake’s blog — Inside the world of indirect prompt injection | Long-form follow-up to the original paper, with new attack chains |
For a curated, frequently-updated database of jailbreak prompts and techniques, jailbreakdb.com ↗ and the technical writeups at aisec.blog ↗ cover the offensive side in operational detail.
On Defense and Guardrails
| Article | What It Adds |
|---|---|
| Lilian Weng — Adversarial Attacks on LLMs ↗ | Comprehensive technical survey of attack classes and known defenses |
| Anthropic — Constitutional AI ↗ | The theoretical basis behind a major class of safety training |
| Microsoft — PyRIT release post ↗ | Practical view from one of the largest production red-team programs |
| Google DeepMind — Frontier Safety Framework ↗ | Capability-thresholds approach to model deployment risk |
The Lilian Weng survey is the most technically dense single reference for engineers building defenses. Defensive technique writeups also live at guardml.io ↗.
On Red Teaming
| Article | What It Adds |
|---|---|
| Microsoft — Lessons from red-teaming 100 generative AI products ↗ | Patterns from a substantial corpus of real engagements |
| Anthropic — Frontier red team blog series | Inside view of how a frontier lab structures pre-deployment testing |
| OWASP — AI Red Teaming Guide ↗ | Checklist-format guide aimed at organizations standing up the function |
| MITRE ATLAS — Case study series | Documented real-world AI attack scenarios mapped to ATT&CK-style techniques |
For tooling comparisons see our AI red teaming tools guide.
On Agent Security
The agent security literature is still young, but a few pieces are already canonical:
- Computer use safety considerations ↗ — Anthropic’s threat model for desktop-driving agents
- Prompt injection in MCP tool ecosystems — community writeups (see Simon Willison’s archive) that surface the new injection surface introduced by tool servers
- Securing AI Agents — OWASP draft ↗ — early-stage but the direction is being set
Our own coverage of agent security tooling maps the defenses to these threats.
On Incidents and Real-World Failures
| Article | What It Adds |
|---|---|
| Stanford CRFM — Foundation model transparency reports | Structured evaluation of what major model vendors disclose |
| AI Incident Database — Yearly summary reports | Longitudinal view of public AI failures and harms |
| ai-alert.org — Network feed | Curated AI incident, CVE, and disclosure tracking |
| ENISA — AI threat landscape reports | Annual European-perspective threat assessments |
Reviewing actual incidents is the fastest way to calibrate intuition about what risks are real versus theoretical. Independent tool reviews live at aisecreviews.com ↗.
On Governance and Policy
- EU AI Act explanatory guidance ↗ — keep one bookmark for the canonical text and one for high-quality plain-language explainers
- NIST AI 100-2: Adversarial Machine Learning Taxonomy — the formal vocabulary for adversarial ML, increasingly referenced in regulation
- Cloud Security Alliance — AI Security Working Group outputs ↗ — vendor-neutral practitioner guidance
Policy commentary on the neuralwatch.org ↗ site tracks ongoing regulatory developments.
What Got Cut
Articles that don’t make this list: vendor blog posts that read as marketing without measurement, “Top 100” listicles, anything reliant on screenshots of jailbreak prompts in chat UIs without an underlying technique to teach. The bar for inclusion is that an experienced practitioner can read the piece and walk away with a different decision they’d make next week.
Update Cadence
This list is reviewed quarterly. Foundational entries are stable; the agent-security, MCP injection, and incident sections see the most churn quarter-to-quarter. New entries replace older ones rather than accumulate — the value of the list is its size.
Sources
- OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications ↗ — The taxonomy referenced throughout this curation.
- Greshake et al. — Indirect Prompt Injection (arXiv 2302.12173) ↗ — The foundational paper on indirect injection attacks.
- Anthropic — Many-shot jailbreaking research ↗ — Representative example of frontier-lab attack research worth tracking.
- Simon Willison — Prompt injection writing archive ↗ — The most useful single ongoing source on prompt injection in plain English.
Sources
Best AI Security Tools — in your inbox
Comparing the AI security tooling landscape, with numbers. — delivered when there's something worth your inbox.
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Related
XL-SafetyBench Wants LLM Safety Teams to Stop Grading in English
A new 5,500-case multilingual benchmark separates principled refusal from comprehension failure, and exposes how much frontier safety still rides on English-only assumptions.
Best AI Agent Security Tools: Protecting Autonomous LLMs in 2026
A curated comparison of the best AI agent security tools — runtime guardrails, tool-use sandboxing, identity governance, and behavioral monitoring for production agent deployments.
Best AI Security Practices for LLM Apps: A Production Checklist
Curated AI security best practices covering threat modeling, runtime defenses, evaluation pipelines, identity, monitoring, and incident response — mapped to OWASP, NIST, and MITRE ATLAS.