The coordination gap in frontier AI safety policies
For AI governance actors, the paper highlights a critical oversight in current safety policies and offers a framework to address coordination failures.
The paper identifies a structural coordination gap in frontier AI safety policies, where investments in ecosystem robustness are systematically underinvested due to diffuse benefits and concentrated costs. It proposes adapting mechanisms from nuclear safety and pandemic preparedness, such as precommitment and shared protocols, to close this gap.
Frontier AI Safety Policies concentrate on prevention: capability evaluations, deployment gates, and usage constraints, while neglecting the capacity to coordinate responses when prevention fails. We argue this coordination gap is structural: investments in ecosystem robustness yield diffuse benefits but concentrated costs, generating systematic underinvestment. Drawing on risk regimes in nuclear safety, pandemic preparedness, and critical infrastructure, we propose that similar mechanisms (precommitment, shared protocols, standing coordination venues) could be adapted to frontier AI governance. Closing the gap requires cross-actor "note-exchange" of ex ante if-then response logic, exposing not only triggers but the decision processes that convert signals into actions. Without such architecture, institutions cannot learn from failures at the pace of relevance.