Harmonizing AI Safety Thresholds
Abstract
Frontier AI companies have published capability thresholds that differ substantially, making it difficult for third parties to verify whether a threshold has been crossed or to compare requirements across companies. Moreover, without common minimum thresholds, risk mitigation may be inconsistent, creating a potential race to the bottom in safety standards. We develop a methodology for deriving harmonized thresholds across three risk domains. For misuse risks (cyber and biological), we take expected harm as the key primitive and use an explicit risk-modeling approach that accounts for risk channels and model release conditions. For automated AI R&D, we base our proposed threshold on the observed rate of AI progress rather than expected harm. Our analysis expands upon prior work and highlights existing empirical gaps and limitations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.16112,
title = {Harmonizing AI Safety Thresholds},
author = {Wilber Sean Anterola and Matthew Ball and Luis F. Lafuerza and Markov Grey},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.16112},
year = {2026}
}