GCD AI RADAR
incidents/AIR-2023-0008

Researchers replicate machine translation services and transfer adversarial attacks

Attack on AI1 Research / proof of conceptModel theft / extractionAdversarial evasion

Academic researchers successfully replicated commercial translation APIs and used the extraction to craft adversarial inputs causing targeted translation errors. The work demonstrates model extraction and adversarial vulnerability.

Details

type
Attack on AI
An AI model, agent or AI-powered product was the thing exploited, abused or leaked.
categories
  • Model theft / extractionprimary
    Weights stolen, or model behaviour replicated through extraction or distillation attacks.
  • Adversarial evasion
    Inputs crafted to make a model misclassify or miss detections (perturbations, evasion of AI-based defences).
owasp llm top 10
mitre atlas
Both rows are derived from the type and categories (OWASP 2025 edition, ATLAS release 2026.09), not classified per record. How
severity
1 · Research / proof of concept
Demonstrated by researchers; no known real-world exploitation.
targets
Google, Enterprise deployment
products
Google Translate, Bing Translator, Systran Translate
incident date
31 Mar 2023
first reported
31 Mar 2023
origin
AVID
classifier confidence
0.95 · published at or above 0.80; see the methodology
tags
model-extraction · adversarial-evasion · translation
record
created 2026-10-18 06:56Z · updated 2026-10-18 06:56Z · json

Sources · 5

  1. 2023-03-31
    AVID-2023-V006: Machine translation services (such as Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Systran Translate) provide public-facing UIs and APIs.
    AVID · github.com/avidml/avid-db/blob/main/vulnerabilities/2023/AVID-2023-V006.json
  2. 2023-03-31
    Attack on Machine Translation Service - Google Translate, Bing Translator, and Systran Translate
    MITRE ATLAS · atlas.mitre.org/studies/AML.CS0005
  3. 2023-03-31
    Wallace, Eric, et al. "Imitation Attacks and Defenses for Black-box Machine Translation Systems" EMNLP 2020
    arXiv · arxiv.org/abs/2004.15015
  4. 2023-03-31
    Project Page, "Imitation Attacks and Defenses for Black-box Machine Translation Systems"
    ericswallace.com · ericswallace.com/imitation
  5. 2023-03-31
    Google under fire for mistranslating Chinese amid Hong Kong protests
    thehill.com · thehill.com/policy/international/asia-pacific/449164-google-under-fire-for-mistr

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