AI Safety Index: Big Tech’s Failing Grade
Big tech is failing, or at best a C student, when it comes to keeping us safe from AI, according to the latest iteration of the AI Safety Index released by the Future of Life institute last week.the Index grades the world’s major frontier AI labs on their transparency, technical safeguards, governance practices – and their readiness to mitigate existential risks.
The Index is meant as both a report card and a public feedback tool, leveraging independent scrutiny until government regulations catch up.
“The purpose of this is not to shame anybody,” said Max Tegmark, MIT physicist and co-founder of the Future of Life Institute, which nearly three years ago crystalized public anxiety over increasingly powerful thinking machines with a petition to pause advancement until a regulatory regime was in place. “It’s to provide incentives for companies to improve.”
November 2025; Max Tegmark, Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Photo by Paul Devlin/Sportsfile for Web Summit via Getty Images)
Sportsfile via Getty Images
Tegmark hopes that until regulation can slow the race as major players rush to reach artificial general intelligence, the Index will create public pressure thay can’t ignore much as universities can’t ignore U.S. News & World Report rankings.
But without binding standards, he concedes, no company feels able to slow down.With serious regulation, he argues, the competitive incentive would flip: whoever clears the safety bar first would be allowed to deploy first.
A Scorecard for a critical Moment
The 2024 Index evaluated six companies-Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, openai, xAI, and China’s Zhipu AI-across six categories: risk assessment, current harms, safety frameworks, existential safety strategy, governance and accountability, and transparency and interaction. The grading system mirrors
Worth a look