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Future of Life Institute: AI Safety Index 2024
webCredibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Future of Life Institute
A high-profile civil society audit of leading AI labs' safety practices, useful for understanding how external organizations assess and compare industry safety commitments; complements internal lab safety cards and government evaluations.
Metadata
Importance: 62/100organizational reportanalysis
Summary
The Future of Life Institute's AI Safety Index 2024 systematically evaluates six leading AI companies—including OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Meta, xAI, and Mistral—across 42 safety indicators spanning risk management, transparency, governance, and preparedness for advanced AI threats. The index finds widespread deficiencies in safety practices and provides letter-grade assessments to benchmark industry progress. It serves as a comparative accountability tool aimed at pressuring companies toward stronger safety commitments.
Key Points
- •Evaluates six major AI labs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Mistral) across 42 safety indicators with letter-grade scores.
- •Finds significant gaps in risk management, safety governance, and preparedness for catastrophic or existential AI risks across the industry.
- •Covers dimensions including model evaluations, safety research investment, transparency, accountability mechanisms, and deployment safeguards.
- •Intended as an accountability and benchmarking tool to track industry-wide safety progress over time.
- •Published by FLI, a prominent AI safety advocacy organization, reflecting civil society efforts to independently assess lab safety practices.
Review
The AI Safety Index represents a critical independent assessment of safety practices in leading AI companies, revealing substantial shortcomings in risk management and control strategies. The study, conducted by seven distinguished AI and governance experts, used a comprehensive methodology involving public information and tailored industry surveys to grade companies across 42 indicators of responsible AI development. The research uncovered alarming findings, including universal vulnerability to adversarial attacks, inadequate strategies for controlling potential artificial general intelligence (AGI), and a concerning tendency to prioritize profit over safety. The panel, comprised of respected academics, emphasized the urgent need for external oversight and independent validation of safety frameworks. Key experts like Stuart Russell suggested that the current technological approach might fundamentally be unable to provide necessary safety guarantees, indicating a potentially systemic problem in AI development rather than merely isolated corporate failures.
Cited by 5 pages
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| AI Accident Risk Cruxes | Crux | 67.0 |
| Intervention Timing Windows | Analysis | 72.0 |
| AI Safety Institutes (AISIs) | Policy | 69.0 |
| AI Safety Field Building and Community | Crux | 0.0 |
| Corrigibility Failure | Risk | 62.0 |
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FLI AI Safety Index 2024 - Future of Life Institute
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Seven AI and governance experts evaluate the safety practices of six leading general-purpose AI companies.
Rapidly improving AI capabilities have increased interest in how companies report, assess and attempt to mitigate associated risks. The 2024 FLI AI Safety Index therefore convened an independent panel of seven distinguished AI and governance experts to evaluate the safety practices of six leading general-purpose AI companies across six critical domains.
One-page Summary
Press Release
Date published 11 December, 2024 Last updated 1 April, 2025 View PDF Contents
Latest edition
Winter 2025
Safety Index
December 2025
Scorecard
Grading: Uses the US GPA system for grade boundaries: A+, A, A-, B+, […], F letter values corresponding to numerical values 4.3, 4.0, 3.7, 3.3, […], 0. Panel of graders
Yoshua Bengio
Atoosa Kasirzadeh
David Krueger
Tegan Maharaj
Jessica Newman
Sneha Revanur
Stuart Russell
Key Findings
Large risk management disparities: While some companies have established initial safety frameworks or conducted some serious risk assessment efforts, others have yet to take even the most basic precautions.
Jailbreaks: All the flagship models were found to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks.
Control-Problem: Despite their explicit ambitions to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), capable of rivaling or exceeding human intelligence, the review panel deemed the current strategies of all companies inadequate for ensuring that these systems remain safe and under human control.
External oversight: Reviewers consistently highlighted how companies were unable to resist profit-driven incentives to cut corners on safety in the absence of independent oversight. While Anthropic’s current and OpenAI’s initial governance structures were highlighted as promising, experts called for third-party validation of risk assessment and safety framework compliance across all companies.
Methodology
The Index aims to foster transparency, promote robust safety practices, highlight areas for improvement and empower the public to discern genuine safety measures from empty claims.
An independent review panel of leading experts on technical and governance aspects of general-purpose AI volunteered to assess the companies’ performances across 42 indicators of responsible conduct, contributing letter grades, brief justifications, and recommendations for improvement. The panellist selection focused on academia rather than industry to reduce potential conflicts of interest.
The evaluation was supported by a comprehensive evidence base with company-specific information sourced from 1) publicly available material, including related research papers, policy documents, news articles, and industry reports, and 2) a tailored industry survey which firms could use to increase transparency ar
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