AI Security Research Should Better Incentivize Defense Research
Youqian Zhang
Oct 2026
Artificial IntelligenceCybersecurity
Abstract
This work examines an imbalance in artificial intelligence (AI) security research: the field tends to produce more work on attacking AI systems than on defending them. Drawing on related academic papers, we find biased attack-to-defense ratios across subfields, including federated learning, speech recognition, membership inference, large language models, etc. The imbalance possibly means far beyond a simple count: attack papers are routinely evaluated under favorable conditions that make threats look more severe than they are in practice, while defenses are held to a stricter standard that few can meet. The result is a literature rich in demonstrated vulnerabilities and thin on usable and deployed protections. We thus argue that AI security research should better incentivize defense research.
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