Position: AI Safety Must Embrace an Antifragile Perspective
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Abstract (arXiv)
This position paper contends that modern AI research must adopt an antifragile perspective on safety -- one in which the system's capacity to guarantee long-term AI safety such as handling rare or out-of-distribution (OOD) events expands over time. Conventional static benchmarks and single-shot robustness tests overlook the reality that environments evolve and that models, if left unchallenged, can drift into maladaptation (e.g., reward hacking, over-optimization, or atrophy of broader capabilities). We argue that an antifragile approach -- Rather than striving to rapidly reduce current uncertainties, the emphasis is on leveraging those uncertainties to better prepare for potentially greater, more unpredictable uncertainties in the future -- is pivotal for the long-term reliability of open-ended ML systems. In this position paper, we first identify key limitations of static testing, including scenario diversity, reward hacking, and over-alignment. We then explore the potential of antifragile solutions to manage rare events. Crucially, we advocate for a fundamental recalibration of the methods used to measure, benchmark, and continually improve AI safety over the long term, complementing existing robustness approaches by providing ethical and practical guidelines towards fostering an antifragile AI safety community.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 11 Sep 2025.
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 4.
5 papers.
- 2026From Secure Agentic AI to Secure Agentic Web: Challenges, Threats, and Future Directionscited by 1
- 2025From Capabilities to Performance: Evaluating Key Functional Properties of LLM Architectures in Penetration Testingcited by 0
- 2026Learning to Diagnose and Correct Moral Errors: Beyond Shallow Heuristics in Moral Alignmentcited by 0
- 2026An Investigation of the NeurIPS and ICML 2025 Position Trackscited by 0
- 2026Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailmentcited by 0
- 2026Visual Compliance via Executable Safety Rule Entailment16 Sep 2026
- 2026An Investigation of the NeurIPS and ICML 2025 Position Tracks6 Jul 2026
- 2026From Secure Agentic AI to Secure Agentic Web: Challenges, Threats, and Future Directions2 Mar 2026
- 2026Learning to Diagnose and Correct Moral Errors: Beyond Shallow Heuristics in Moral Alignment6 Jan 2026
- 2025From Capabilities to Performance: Evaluating Key Functional Properties of LLM Architectures in Penetration Testing16 Sep 2025
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- 2025Safety by Measurement: A Systematic Literature Review of AI Safety Evaluation Methods
- 2026Taxonomy and Consistency Analysis of Safety Benchmarks for AI Agents
- 2025Safety Must Precede the Deployment of Open-Ended AI
- 2024Towards Guaranteed Safe AI: A Framework for Ensuring Robust and Reliable AI Systems
- 2025Domain-Agnostic Scalable AI Safety Ensuring Framework
- 2024The Reasoning Under Uncertainty Trap: A Structural AI Risk
- 2026The safety failures we are not instrumenting: a perspective on hidden safety-critical challenges in modern AI systems
- 2026ForesightSafety Bench: A Frontier Risk Evaluation and Governance Framework towards Safe AI