Red Teaming Would Fix Liberalism’s Crisis

In the early 1960s, the RAND Corporation, a think tank based in Santa Monica, California, popularized the idea of red and blue teams. The red team had to think like the Soviet military and probe the US for weaknesses. The home team, or blue team, had to counter the red team, with the two often engaged in prolonged war games. The idea is simple: To fight a formidable adversary we need to think like the adversary. Think red or be red.

Since then, red teaming has spread to government, business and beyond. The CIA created a new red cell in response to the September 11 attacks, and the US military extended its use of red teaming after the failures of the Iraq War. Red teaming is standard in the world of cybersecurity, where companies use internal hackers to probe their digital infrastructure. Google operates a dedicated AI red team to stress-test large language models for vulnerabilities such as the theft of sensitive data (“data exfiltration”) or using prompts to ignore ethical guardrails (“jailbreaking”).