Intermediate · Safety

Safety

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Designing AI systems to behave reliably and avoid causing harm under realistic conditions.

Technical Definition

Designing AI systems to behave reliably and avoid causing harm under realistic conditions.

How it works

Safety covers robustness to bad inputs, refusal of harmful requests, avoidance of catastrophic mistakes, and graceful failure. It overlaps with alignment, security, and ethics, and is increasingly enforced through evaluation suites, red teaming, and policy frameworks.

Related Concepts

• AI Alignment — The research field aimed at making AI systems pursue the goals their developers and users actually intend.
• Guardrails — Runtime checks that constrain model inputs and outputs to stay within safe, useful bounds.
• Red Teaming — Systematically probing an AI system for failures, exploits, and harmful behavior before deployment.