‘By really shedding light on what companies are doing, we give them an incentive to do better,’ the Future of Life Institute’s president said.
Eight major artificial intelligence (AI) developers are failing to plan for how they would manage extreme risks posed by future AI models that match or surpass human capabilities, according to a study by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) published Dec. 3.
FLI’s Winter 2025 AI Safety Index assessed U.S. companies Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, and xAI, and Chinese companies Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba Cloud across six themes, which included current harms, safety frameworks, and existential safety.
The independent panel of experts who conducted the review found that even with the highest-scoring developers, “existential safety remains the industry’s core structural weakness.”
Artificial narrow intelligence, or weak AI, is the current level of AI that exists today, according to IBM.
Tech giants are working toward developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), or strong AI, which IBM defines as AI that can “use previous learnings and skills to accomplish new tasks in a different context without the need for human beings to train the underlying models.”
Artificial superintelligence or Super AI, if realized, “would think, reason, learn, make judgements and possess cognitive abilities that surpass those of human beings,” according to IBM.
“All of the companies reviewed are racing toward AGI/superintelligence without presenting any explicit plans for controlling or aligning such smarter-than-human technology, thus leaving the most consequential risks effectively unaddressed,” FLI said in the report.
All Fail on Existential Safety
The findings of the evaluation were presented in the form of report cards with letter grades from A to F, accompanied by a corresponding numerical grade point average (GPA).
For the existential safety metric, which “examines companies’ preparedness for managing extreme risks from future AI systems that could match or exceed human capabilities, including stated strategies and research for alignment and control,” not one developer scored higher than D.
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind all achieved a D, which, according to FLI, indicates a weak strategy that contains “vague or incomplete plans for alignment and control” or shows “minimal evidence of technical rigor.”
The remaining five developers scored Fs, meaning they were regarded as having “no credible strategy,” lacking safeguards or increasing their catastrophic-risk exposure.
