A safety report card ranks AI company efforts to protect humanity

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Are artificial intelligence companies keeping humanity safe from AI’s potential harms? Don’t bet on it, a new report card says.As AI plays an increasingly larger role in the way humans interact with technology, the potential harms are becoming more clear — people using AI-powered chatbots for counseling and then dying by suicide, or using AI for cyberattacks.There are also future risks — AI being used to make weapons or overthrow governments.Yet there are not enough incentives for AI firms to prioritize keeping humanity safe, and that’s reflected in an AI Safety Index published Wednesday by Silicon Valley-based nonprofit Future of Life Institute that aims to steer AI into a safer direction and limit the existential risks to humanity.

“They are the only industry in the U.S.making powerful technology that’s completely unregulated, so that puts them in a race to the bottom against each other where they just don’t have the incentives to prioritize safety,” said the institute’s president and MIT professor Max Tegmark in an interview.

Business OpenAI is the latest tech company to face a lawsuit alleging chatbots are providing teens with self-harm content.The highest overall grades given were only a C+, given to two San Francisco AI companies: OpenAI, which produces ChatGPT, and Anthropic, known for its AI chatbot model Claude.Google’s AI division, Google DeepMind, was given a C.Ranking even lower were Facebook’s Menlo Park-based parent company, Meta, and Elon Musk’s Palo Alto-based company, xAI, which were given a D.

Chinese firms Z.ai and DeepSeek also earned a D.The lowest grade was given to Alibaba Cloud, which got a D-.

The companies’ overall grades were based on 35 indicators in six categories, including existential safety, risk assessment and information sharing.The index collected evidence based on publicly available materials and responses from t...