Survey finds that AI companies’ safety measures do not meet global standards

The new version of the Future of Life Institute’s AI Safety Index released Wednesday says the safety practices of leading artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Meta “fall far short of new global standards.”

The institute said a security assessment conducted by an independent panel of experts found that while companies were working hard to develop superintelligence, none had a solid strategy for controlling such advanced systems.

The study comes amid growing public concern about the social impact of smarter-than-human systems capable of reasoning and logical thinking, following several cases of suicide and self-harm linked to AI chatbots.

“Despite the recent uproar over AI-powered hacking and how AI is driving people to mental illness and self-harm, U.S. AI companies remain less regulated than restaurants and continue to lobby against binding safety standards,” said Max Tegmark, professor and Future of Life president at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The AI ​​race shows no signs of slowing down either, with major technology companies spending hundreds of billions of dollars to upgrade and expand their machine learning efforts. The Future of Life Institute is a nonprofit organization concerned about the risks that intelligent machines pose to humanity.

It was founded in 2014 and had early backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In October, a group including scientists Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio called for a ban on the development of superintelligent artificial intelligence until the public demands it and science provides a safe path forward.

Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba Cloud did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the investigation, although XAI said in what appeared to be an automated response that it was a “legacy media lie.”

(Those who are suffering or have suicidal thoughts are encouraged to call the helpline number here for help and counseling)