AI safety is the multidisciplinary field focused on preventing AI systems from causing harm to users, third parties, or society broadly. It encompasses technical alignment research, robustness testing, red-teaming, deployment safeguards, evaluation methodologies, content moderation, and policy work. AI safety operates both as a research field at frontier labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, Google) and as an operational discipline that startups building with AI must take seriously. It's the field trying to ensure AI gets deployed responsibly as capabilities scale rapidly.
The categories of AI safety concern:
Misuse: