Harmonizing AI Safety Thresholds
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Abstract (arXiv)
Frontier AI companies have published capability thresholds that differ substantially, making it difficult for third parties to verify whether a threshold has been crossed or to compare requirements across companies. Moreover, without common minimum thresholds, risk mitigation may be inconsistent, creating a potential race to the bottom in safety standards. We develop a methodology for deriving harmonized thresholds across three risk domains. For misuse risks (cyber and biological), we take expected harm as the key primitive and use an explicit risk-modeling approach that accounts for risk channels and model release conditions. For automated AI R&D, we base our proposed threshold on the observed rate of AI progress rather than expected harm. Our analysis expands upon prior work and highlights existing empirical gaps and limitations.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 15 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 17 Jul 2026.
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References · 15
- 2024Cybench: A Framework for Evaluating Cybersecurity Capabilities and Risks of Language Modelscited by 164
- 2025CyberGym: Evaluating AI Agents' Real-World Cybersecurity Capabilities at Scalecited by 78
- 2024CRISPR-GPT for Agentic Automation of Gene-editing Experimentscited by 58
- 2023Artificial intelligence and biological misuse: Differentiating risks of language models and biological design toolscited by 45
- 2025A Rosetta Stone for AI Benchmarkscited by 36
- 2026Measuring AI Agents' Progress on Multi-Step Cyber Attack Scenarioscited by 14
- 2024Risk thresholds for frontier AIcited by 9
- 2025LabOS: The AI-XR Co-Scientist That Sees and Works With Humanscited by 9
- 2025Contemporary AI foundation models increase biological weapons riskcited by 5
- 2025Generative AI for Biosciences: Emerging Threats and Roadmap to Biosecuritycited by 5
- 2025Toward Quantitative Modeling of Cybersecurity Risks Due to AI Misusecited by 3
- 2025A Methodology for Quantitative AI Risk Modelingcited by 2
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