frontier safety
Research and practices aimed at ensuring very large, capable models don't cause harm—evaluating risks, designing mitigations, and testing before deployment.
Think of it like
Pilot testing a new plane design in a simulator before flying with passengers.
Example
Before releasing Claude 3, Anthropic evaluated it on biosecurity, autonomous hacking, and planning capabilities—measuring failure modes, then building guardrails.
How it actually works
Frontier safety is high-stakes because the risks are abstract and potentially existential. It's not traditional cybersecurity; it's about what a superhuman model might be capable of and how to prevent misuse. Evals, interpretability, RLHF, capability monitoring all fall under it.
For product teams
Risk management for advanced models; required by regulators in some regions.
For engineers
Red-teaming, adversarial testing, evals on dangerous capabilities.
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