Cognitive Overload

Exploits the model's finite context window and attention budget. By embedding a harmful request within a large volume of benign tasks, the attacker dilutes the safety classifier's signal-to-noise ratio. The harmful instruction competes for attention with legitimate tasks, and the model's safety reasoning may allocate insufficient processing to detect it.

• Flag prompts exceeding length thresholds with mixed benign/restricted content patterns
• Apply safety classification to segmented windows of long inputs (not just the full context)
• Detect "needle" patterns: restricted content keywords appearing once in an otherwise benign document

Chains to T1-AT-015 (Obfuscation Through Complexity) — cognitive overload provides the noise environment in which complex obfuscated requests succeed. Chains to T12 (RAG Poisoning) when long-context burial is applied to RAG documents rather than direct prompts.