OpenAI, Google pushing new AI models easily tricked into making nudes, researchers say

“Critically, none of these requests required custom-built or frontier AI models,” White Circle warned, so no AI expertise is needed to execute the attacks.

Researchers reviewed the outputs to verify the bypass rate, which White Circle noted is “the highest of any method tested under the same standard.” The key takeaway, they suggested, is that, “at a time when AI safety has never been under more scrutiny, the defenses leading labs have built are far weaker than they acknowledge.”

By publishing research like this, White Circle is positioning itself as an external evaluator of frontier labs, and it plans to open-source the entire attack pipeline so model makers can understand the true scale of the vulnerability and build stronger protections. Although the company has not widely promoted the research yet, it will share it at a prominent AI conference this November, NeurIPS 2026, which may increase scrutiny on Google and OpenAI later this fall.

White Circle has shared its findings with some frontier AI labs through “mutual contacts,” Shilov told Ars, but neither Google nor OpenAI responded to Ars’ request to comment directly on vulnerabilities found in their models.

Meanwhile, OpenAI and Google have released new models—ChatGPT Images 2.5 and Nano Banana 2.1—and White Circle told Ars that prompt safety testing using the same method showed “both are significantly more breakable than their previous versions.”

Neither company responded after Ars shared these new findings.

White Circle’s attack method can break down frontier defenses in categories, like explicit content, that seem easy to spot, which doesn’t bode well for more serious defense systems currently being updated to block other unwanted AI behavior, like hacking, Shilov told Ars.

“White Circle’s working hypothesis for this is either the newer models are more sophisticated and capable of generating a wider range of content, or that safety has been deprioritized in favor of capability,” White Circle told Ars.