# Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks

> Source: <https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94/>
> Published: 2026-10-07 00:00:00+00:00

##### Abstract

Code-capable large language model (LLM) agents are embedded in software engineering workflows where they can read, write, and execute code, raising “jailbreak" stakes beyond text-only settings. Prior evaluations emphasize refusal or harmful-text detection, leaving open whether agents compile and run malicious programs. We present JAWS-BENCH(Jailbreaks Across WorkSpaces), a benchmark spanning three escalating workspace regimes mirroring attacker capability: empty (JAWS-0), single-file (JAWS-1), and multi-file (JAWS-M). We pair it with a hierarchical, executable-aware Judge Framework that tests (i) compliance, (ii) attack success, (iii) syntactic correctness, and (iv) runtime executability to measure de-ployable harm. Across seven LLM backends from five families, prompt-only attacks in JAWS-0 achieve 61% compliance; 58% are harmful, 52% parse, and 27% run end-to-end. In JAWS-1, compliance reaches 100% for stronger models with a mean ASR (Attack Success Rate) ≈ 71%; JAWS-M raises mean ASR to ≈ 75%, with 32% runnable attack code. Wrapping an LLM in an agent increases ASR by 1.6×, by overturning initial refusals during planning and tool use. Additional evaluations with SWE-Agent and OpenAI Codex exhibit similar trends, indicating that JAWS-BENCH can be reused across multiple agent frameworks. Category analyses identify which attack classes are most vulnerable and deployable, motivating execution-aware defenses and refusal-preserving agent designs.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.tacl-1.94
- Volume:
- [Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 14](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2026.tacl-1/)
- Month:
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- Cambridge, MA
- Venue:
- [TACL](https://aclanthology.org/venues/tacl/)
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- MIT Press
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2081–2102
- Language:
- URL:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94/](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94/)
- DOI:
- [10.1162/tacl.a.792](https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl.a.792)
- Cite (ACL):
- Shoumik Saha, Jifan Chen, Sam Mayers, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Zijian Wang, and Varun Kumar. 2026. [Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94/) .*Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics* , 14:2081–2102.
- Cite (Informal):
- [Breaking the Code: Security Assessment of AI Code Agents Through Systematic Jailbreaking Attacks](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94/) (Saha et al., TACL 2026)
- PDF:
- [https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94.pdf](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.94.pdf)