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Safety

AI Safety

The interdisciplinary field studying how to develop AI systems that are safe, reliable, and beneficial.

Full Definition

AI safety encompasses both near-term safety (preventing current models from causing harm through misuse, hallucination, or bias) and long-term safety (ensuring advanced AI systems remain under human control and aligned with human values at superhuman capability levels). Near-term safety work includes content moderation, red-teaming, adversarial robustness, and differential privacy. Long-term safety research focuses on alignment, interpretability, scalable oversight, and formal guarantees. Major AI labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind) have dedicated safety teams. The debate between 'move fast' and 'safety-first' approaches to AI development is one of the defining tensions in the field.

Examples

1

Anthropic's responsible scaling policy, which commits to conducting capability evaluations before deploying each new model and pausing deployment if dangerous capability thresholds are crossed.

2

Constitutional AI's critique-and-revision loop as a near-term safety mechanism that reduces harmful outputs without human labelling.

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