8.4CYMar 22
Evaluating AI Companies' Frontier Safety Frameworks: Methodology and ResultsLily Stelling, Malcolm Murray, Bruno Galizzi et al.
Following the AI Seoul Summit in 2024, twelve AI companies published frontier AI safety frameworks (Frameworks) outlining their approaches to managing catastrophic risks from advanced AI systems. Emerging legislation increasingly treats these Frameworks as external accountability mechanisms, incorporating them into reporting requirements. But what do the Frameworks actually commit each company to do? This study assesses 12 Frameworks, using 65 weighted criteria, across four dimensions: risk identification, risk analysis & evaluation, risk treatment, and risk governance. Our criteria adapt established risk management principles from other high-risk industries (e.g. aviation, nuclear power) to the frontier AI context, following Campos et al. (2025). Overall scores range from 34% (Anthropic) to 8% (Cohere), with a median of 18%. Many aspects are missing or under-specified. These low scores may be natural given the nascency of AI risk management compared to industries with decades of practice. The current Frameworks are limited as accountability functions, with vague commitments that make it difficult to predict company decisions, assess whether planned responses are adequate, or determine whether commitments have been kept. Higher scores appear feasible within current constraints: a company adopting all leading practices currently adopted across their peers would score 51%, almost triple the median.
4.3CYApr 14, 2024
Affirmative safety: An approach to risk management for high-risk AIAkash R. Wasil, Joshua Clymer, David Krueger et al.
Prominent AI experts have suggested that companies developing high-risk AI systems should be required to show that such systems are safe before they can be developed or deployed. The goal of this paper is to expand on this idea and explore its implications for risk management. We argue that entities developing or deploying high-risk AI systems should be required to present evidence of affirmative safety: a proactive case that their activities keep risks below acceptable thresholds. We begin the paper by highlighting global security risks from AI that have been acknowledged by AI experts and world governments. Next, we briefly describe principles of risk management from other high-risk fields (e.g., nuclear safety). Then, we propose a risk management approach for advanced AI in which model developers must provide evidence that their activities keep certain risks below regulator-set thresholds. As a first step toward understanding what affirmative safety cases should include, we illustrate how certain kinds of technical evidence and operational evidence can support an affirmative safety case. In the technical section, we discuss behavioral evidence (evidence about model outputs), cognitive evidence (evidence about model internals), and developmental evidence (evidence about the training process). In the operational section, we offer examples of organizational practices that could contribute to affirmative safety cases: information security practices, safety culture, and emergency response capacity. Finally, we briefly compare our approach to the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. Overall, we hope our work contributes to ongoing discussions about national and global security risks posed by AI and regulatory approaches to address these risks.
14.7AIFeb 10, 2025
A Frontier AI Risk Management Framework: Bridging the Gap Between Current AI Practices and Established Risk ManagementSimeon Campos, Henry Papadatos, Fabien Roger et al.
The recent development of powerful AI systems has highlighted the need for robust risk management frameworks in the AI industry. Although companies have begun to implement safety frameworks, current approaches often lack the systematic rigor found in other high-risk industries. This paper presents a comprehensive risk management framework for the development of frontier AI that bridges this gap by integrating established risk management principles with emerging AI-specific practices. The framework consists of four key components: (1) risk identification (through literature review, open-ended red-teaming, and risk modeling), (2) risk analysis and evaluation using quantitative metrics and clearly defined thresholds, (3) risk treatment through mitigation measures such as containment, deployment controls, and assurance processes, and (4) risk governance establishing clear organizational structures and accountability. Drawing from best practices in mature industries such as aviation or nuclear power, while accounting for AI's unique challenges, this framework provides AI developers with actionable guidelines for implementing robust risk management. The paper details how each component should be implemented throughout the life-cycle of the AI system - from planning through deployment - and emphasizes the importance and feasibility of conducting risk management work prior to the final training run to minimize the burden associated with it.
Evaluating the Goal-Directedness of Large Language ModelsTom Everitt, Cristina Garbacea, Alexis Bellot et al.
To what extent do LLMs use their capabilities towards their given goal? We take this as a measure of their goal-directedness. We evaluate goal-directedness on tasks that require information gathering, cognitive effort, and plan execution, where we use subtasks to infer each model's relevant capabilities. Our evaluations of LLMs from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic show that goal-directedness is relatively consistent across tasks, differs from task performance, and is only moderately sensitive to motivational prompts. Notably, most models are not fully goal-directed. We hope our goal-directedness evaluations will enable better monitoring of LLM progress, and enable more deliberate design choices of agentic properties in LLMs.