Current frontier AI safety evaluations emphasize static benchmarks, third-party annotations, and red-teaming. In this position paper, we argue that AI safety research should focus on human-centered evaluations that measure harmful capability uplift: the marginal increase in a user's ability to cause harm with a frontier model beyond what conventional tools already enable. We frame harmful capability uplift as a core AI safety metric, ground it in prior social science research, and provide concrete methodological guidance for systematic measurement. We conclude with actionable steps for developers, researchers, funders, and regulators to make harmful capability uplift evaluation a standard practice.
@article{arxiv.2603.26676,
title = {Evaluating Human-AI Safety: A Framework for Measuring Harmful Capability Uplift},
author = {Michelle Vaccaro and Jaeyoon Song and Abdullah Almaatouq and Michiel A. Bakker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26676},
year = {2026}
}