Mostly low grades for tech firms on AI safety efforts

2 Bay Area companies get the highest marks (C-plus) from Future of Life Institute.

- WENDY LEE

DARIO AMODEI is CEO of Anthropic, which received a safety grade of C-plus.

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 the 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,” the institute's president and MIT professor, Max Tegmark, said in an interview.

The highest overall grades given were only a C-plus, 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-minus.