Anthropic’s ‘responsible scaling’ policy introduces outline for safe AI development

Anthropic, the  artificial intelligence research company behind the chatbot Claude, unveiled a comprehensive Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) this week aimed at mitigating the anticipated risks associated with increasingly capable AI systems.

Borrowing from the US government’s biosafety level standards, the RSP introduces an AI Safety Levels (ASL) framework. This system sets safety, security, and operational standards corresponding to each model’s catastrophic risk potential. Higher ASL standards would require stringent safety demonstrations, with ASL-1 involving systems with no meaningful catastrophic risk, while ASL-4 and above would address systems far from current capabilities.