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Glossary

AI safety

AI safety is about making sure AI systems do what is intended, cause no harm and are not used for malicious ends. It covers the technology, the rules and the oversight behind it.

AI safety is the work that makes sure AI systems are safe and reliable. Two questions go with it. Does the system do what we intend, even in situations nobody thought of? And can someone deploy it for malicious purposes? You can compare it to the safety tests on a new car: you want to know how it reacts before it hits the road.

How does it work?

There are roughly three layers. The first is in the model itself: researchers test how it behaves and try to understand what happens inside. The second is around it: sealed-off workspaces, access rules and checks on what an AI agent may and may not do. The third is with people: agreements, oversight and legislation.

An example of the second layer is Nvidia's OpenShell (link). This software has AI agents work in a sealed-off space and verifies the rules in advance with mathematics. That way a company knows the rules do not accidentally allow more than intended.

Why it matters

The more AI does on its own, the more important it is to know what it is doing. You see this in the news again and again. Anthropic, for example, confirmed that during an internal project Claude took the initiative to request vote counts that the US state of Georgia only offers for a fee (link). A security firm showed with Codex and Claude Code how a file of instructions, sitting among downloaded files, could prompt an AI coding assistant to install malicious software (link).

Defenders are getting help from AI too. AI can find and fix security holes faster, and that is part of AI safety as well. Research and rules have to keep pace with the speed at which the models are improving.

Articles about AI safety