The safety practices of leading AI companies, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI and Meta, are “a long way from emerging global standards,” according to a new edition of the Future of Life Institute’s AI Safety Index released Wednesday.
The institute said the security assessment, conducted by an independent panel of experts, found that while companies were busy competing to develop superintelligence, none had a solid strategy for controlling such advanced systems.
The study comes amid growing public concern about the social impact of smarter-than-human systems, capable of reasoning and thinking logically, after several cases of suicide and self-harm were linked to AI chatbots.
“Despite the recent scandal over AI-powered hacking and AI driving people to psychosis and self-harm, American AI companies remain less regulated than restaurants and continue to push against binding safety standards,” said Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and president of Future of Life.
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The AI race shows no signs of slowing down either: Major tech companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars in upgrading and expanding their machine learning efforts.
The Future of Life Institute is a non-profit organization that expressed concern about the risks that intelligent machines pose to humanity.
In October, a group including scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio called for a ban on the development of super-intelligent artificial intelligence until the public demands it and science paves a safe path forward.
A Google DeepMind spokesperson said the company “will continue to innovate in security and governance at the pace of capabilities” as its models become more advanced, while xAI said “legacy media lies,” in what appeared to be an automated response.
Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, Z.ai, DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the study.
With information from Reuters
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