Towards Frontier Safety Policies Plus

Abstract

This paper examines the state of affairs on Frontier Safety Policies (‘FSPs’) in light of capability progress and growing expectations held by government actors and AI safety researchers from these company-led safety policies. It subsequently argues that FSPs should evolve to a more fine-grained version, which this paper calls ‘FSPs Plus.’ Compared to the first wave of FSPs led by a subset of frontier AI companies (Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy, OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework, and Google DeepMind’s Frontier Safety Framework), FSPs Plus should be built around two main pillars. First, FSPs Plus should adopt a new, reasonably comprehensive, well-defined set of metrics––precursory capabilities. In this respect, this paper recommends that international (e.g., ISO, IEC) or domestic (e.g., NIST, CEN-CENELEC, BIS) standardization bodies develop a standardized taxonomy of precursory components to high-impact capabilities that FSPs Plus could then adopt by reference. While these bodies engage different industry, government, and academia stakeholders in their quest towards standardization, the Frontier Model Forum could lead the way by establishing preliminary consensus amongst frontier AI developers on this topic. Second, FSPs Plus should expressly incorporate AI safety cases and establish a mutual feedback mechanism between FSPs Plus and AI safety cases. To establish such a mutual feedback mechanism, FSPs Plus could be updated to include a clear commitment to make AI safety cases at different milestones in AI systems’ development and deployment, to build and adopt safety measures based on the content and confidence of AI safety cases, and––also on this basis––to keep updating and adjusting FSPs Plus.