The 2025 OpenAI Preparedness Framework does not guarantee any AI risk mitigation practices: a proof-of-concept for affordance analyses of AI safety policies
This work highlights the limitations of current industry self-regulation in mitigating AI risks, suggesting a need for more robust governance interventions.
The study analyzed OpenAI's 2025 Preparedness Framework using affordance theory and found it only evaluates a minority of AI risks, encourages deployment of systems with 'Medium' capabilities that could cause severe harm (defined as >1000 deaths or >$100B in damages), and allows the CEO to deploy even more dangerous capabilities.
Prominent AI companies are producing 'safety frameworks' as a type of voluntary self-governance. These statements purport to establish risk thresholds and safety procedures for the development and deployment of highly capable AI. Understanding which AI risks are covered and what actions are allowed, refused, demanded, encouraged, or discouraged by these statements is vital for assessing how these frameworks actually govern AI development and deployment. We draw on affordance theory to analyse the OpenAI 'Preparedness Framework Version 2' (April 2025) using the Mechanisms & Conditions model of affordances and the MIT AI Risk Repository. We find that this safety policy requests evaluation of a small minority of AI risks, encourages deployment of systems with 'Medium' capabilities for unintentionally enabling 'severe harm' (which OpenAI defines as >1000 deaths or >$100B in damages), and allows OpenAI's CEO to deploy even more dangerous capabilities. These findings suggest that effective mitigation of AI risks requires more robust governance interventions beyond current industry self-regulation. Our affordance analysis provides a replicable method for evaluating what safety frameworks actually permit versus what they claim.