OWASP LLM Top 10: What Every Engineer Building with AI Needs to Know in 2025
A practical breakdown of the ten highest-risk vulnerabilities in LLM-integrated applications — with real mitigation patterns, not just awareness.
When you embed a large language model into a production application, you inherit an entirely new attack surface. The OWASP Top 10 for Large Language Model Applications (version 2025, released by the OWASP Foundation's LLM AI Security & Governance Checklist working group) maps the ten most critical risks. This article walks through each one with concrete examples and what actually mitigates them in a real codebase.
I'm writing this from the perspective of a full-stack engineer who builds agentic systems — where the stakes are higher because models don't just return text; they call tools, read files, and take actions on behalf of users.
LLM01: Prompt Injection
