He also led a team at UC Berkeley that successfully broke seven out of eleven defenses against adversarial attacks presented at the 2018 International Conference on Learning Representations.

In addition to his work on adversarial attacks, Carlini has made significant contributions to understanding the privacy risks of machine learning models.

[13] Following on this, Carlini then showed that ChatGPT would also sometimes output exact copies of webpages it was trained on, including personally identifiable information.

[15] Carlini received the Best of Show award at the 2020 IOCCC for implementing a tic-tac-toe game entirely with calls to printf, expanding on work from a research paper of his from 2015.

The judges commented on his submission "This year's Best of Show (carlini) is such a novel way of obfuscation that it would be worth of a special mention in the (future) Best of IOCCC list!".