Anthropic ensures the safety of its AI models through a variety of techniques and policies, including the Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), AI Safety Levels (ASL), safety filters, and detection models[2][5]. User safety is central to Anthropic's mission to create reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems[5].
Key safety measures:
* Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) Anthropic developed the RSP to manage risks linked to increasingly capable AI models[2]. The policy introduces a framework called AI Safety Levels (ASL), drawing inspiration from the U.S. government's biosafety level (BSL) standards that are used for handling dangerous biological materials[2][7]. The RSP has been formally approved by Anthropic's board, and any changes to the policy must also be approved by the board[2].
* AI Safety Levels (ASL) The ASL framework is designed to ensure that safety, security, and operational standards are appropriate to a model's potential for catastrophic risk[2][7]. Higher ASL levels demand more stringent demonstrations of safety[2]. The policy balances the economic and social value of AI with the need to mitigate severe risks, especially catastrophic risks that could arise from deliberate misuse or unintended destructive behaviors by the models themselves[2].
* Safety filters Anthropic uses safety filters on prompts, which may block responses from the model when their detection models flag content as harmful[5]. They also have enhanced safety filters, which allow them to increase the sensitivity of their detection models[5]. Anthropic may temporarily apply enhanced safety filters to users who repeatedly violate their policies, and remove these controls after a period of no or few violations[5].
* Detection models Anthropic utilizes detection models that flag potentially harmful content based on their usage policy[5].
Additional safeguards:
* Basic safeguards These include storing IDs linked with each API call to pinpoint specific violative content and assigning IDs to users to track individuals violating Anthropicâs AUP[1]. They also ensure customers understand permitted uses and consider requiring customers to sign-up for an account on their platform before utilizing Claude[1].
* Intermediate safeguards Anthropic creates customization frameworks that restrict end-user interactions with Claude to a limited set of prompts or only allow Claude to review a specific knowledge corpus, decreasing the ability of users to engage in violative behavior[1]. They also enable additional safety filters, which are free real-time moderation tooling built by Anthropic for helping detect potentially harmful prompts and managing real-time actions to reduce harm[1].
* Advanced safeguards Running a moderation API against all end-user prompts before they are sent to Claude ensures they are not harmful[1].
* Comprehensive safeguards Anthropic sets up an internal human review system to flag prompts that are marked by Claude or a moderation API as harmful, so they can intervene to restrict or remove users with high violation rates[1].
Anthropic is also committed to the reliability and interpretability of its AI systems, achieved through rigorous research and the application of advanced safety techniques[2]. A significant breakthrough in interpretability is Anthropic's use of sparse autoencoders for 'Monosemantic Feature Extraction,' which simplifies complex neural networks into understandable components[2].
Citations:
[1] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/9199617-api-trust-safety-tools
[2] https://klu.ai/glossary/anthropic-ai
[3] https://myscale.com/blog/transformative-influence-anthropic-ai-safety-measures/
[4] https://www.anthropic.com/news/frontier-model-security
[5] https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8106465-our-approach-to-user-safety
[6] https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/xhKr5KtvdJRssMeJ3/anthropic-s-core-views-on-ai-safety
[7] https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropics-responsible-scaling-policy
[8] https://engineeringideas.substack.com/p/comments-on-anthropics-ai-safety
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6_x0ZOXVVI
[10] https://www.anthropic.com/news/core-views-on-ai-safety