July 06, 2023

Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety

Responsible AI innovation can provide extraordinary benefits to society, such as delivering medical and legal services to more people at lower cost, enabling scalable personalized education, and contributing solutions to pressing global challenges like climate change and pandemic prevention. However, guardrails are necessary to prevent the pursuit of innovation from imposing excessive negative externalities on society. There is increasing recognition that government oversight is needed to ensure AI development is carried out responsibly; we hope to contribute to this conversation by exploring regulatory approaches to this end.

We think that it is important to begin taking practical steps to regulate frontier AI today, and that the ideas discussed in this paper are a step in that direction.

In this paper, we focus specifically on the regulation of frontier AI models, which we define as highly capable foundation models that could have dangerous capabilities sufficient to pose severe risks to public safety and global security. Examples of such dangerous capabilities include designing new biochemical weapons, producing highly persuasive personalized disinformation, and evading human control.

This article was originally published by Arxiv by authors Markus Anderljung, Joslyn Barnhart, Anton Korinek, Jade Leung, Cullen O'Keefe, Jess Whittlestone, Shahar Avin, Miles Brundage, Justin Bullock, Duncan Cass-Beggs, Ben Chang, Tantum Collins, Tim Fist, Gillian Hadfield, Alan Hayes, Lewis Ho, Sara Hooker, Eric Horvitz, Noam Kolt, Jonas Schuett, Yonadav Shavit, Divya Siddarth, Robert Trager, Kevin Wolf.

  • Commentary
    • CEPA
    • May 9, 2025
    Tariffs and Tech: An Uncertain Recipe

    Higher tariffs could prompt American cloud companies to shift more of their capital investments abroad....

    By Pablo Chavez

  • Reports
    • May 8, 2025
    Lessons in Learning

    Executive Summary Although claims of a revolution in military affairs may be overhyped, the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomy to change warfare is growin...

    By Josh Wallin

    • Book
    • April 30, 2025
    Human, Machine, War: How the Mind-Tech Nexus Will Win Future Wars

    Air University Press has published Strategic Multilayer Assessment’s (SMA) latest book, Human, Machine, War: How the Mind-Tech Nexus Will Win Future Wars. Forewords by General...

    By Samuel Bendett & Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan

  • Commentary
    • April 29, 2025
    Five Objectives to Guide U.S. AI Diffusion

    The Framework for AI Diffusion (the Framework) is an ambitious proposal to shape the global distribution of critical AI capabilities, maintain U.S. AI leadership, and prevent ...

    By Janet Egan & Spencer Michaels

View All Reports View All Articles & Multimedia