Reflections on our Responsible Scaling Policy

Last summer we published our first Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP) , which focuses on addressing catastrophic safety failures and misuse of frontier models. In adopting this policy, our primary goal is to help turn high-level safety concepts into practical guidelines for fast-moving technical organizations and demonstrate their viability as possible standards. As we operationalize the policy, we expect to learn a great deal and plan to share our findings. This post shares reflections from implementing the policy so far. We are also working on an updated RSP and will share this soon.

We have found having a clearly-articulated policy on catastrophic risks extremely valuable. It has provided a structured framework to clarify our organizational priorities and frame discussions around project timelines, headcount, threat models, and tradeoffs. The process of implementing the policy has also surfaced a range of important questions, projects, and dependencies that might otherwise have taken longer to identify or gone undiscussed.

Balancing the desire for strong commitments with the reality that we are still seeking the right answers is challenging. In some cases, the original policy is ambiguous and needs clarification. In cases where there are open research questions or uncertainties, setting overly-specific requirements is unlikely to stand the test of time. That said, as industry actors face increasing commercial pressures we hope to move from voluntary commitments to established best practices and then well-crafted regulations.

Our Security, Alignment Science, and Trust and Safety teams have been focused on developing the ASL-3 standard. Their goal is to design and implement a set of controls that will sufficiently mitigate the risk of the model weights being stolen by non-state actors or models being misused via our product surfaces. This standard would be sufficient for many models with capabilities where even a low rate of misuse could be catastrophic. However, it would not be sufficient to handle capabilities which would enable state groups or groups with substantial state backing and resources. Some key reflections are:

As we continue to iterate on and improve the original policy, we are actively exploring ways to incorporate practices from existing risk management and operational safety domains. While none of these domains alone will be perfectly analogous, we expect to find valuable insights from nuclear security, biosecurity, systems safety, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, and cybersecurity. We are building an interdisciplinary team to help us integrate the most relevant and valuable practices from each.

Our current framework for doing so is summarized below, as a set of five high-level commitments.

Our Frontier Red Team and Alignment Science teams have focused on threat modeling and engaging with domain experts. They are primarily focused on (a) improving threat models to determine which capabilities would warrant the ASL-3 standard of security and safety, (b) working with teams developing ASL-3 controls to ensure that those controls are tailored to the correct risks, and (c) mapping capabilities which the ASL-3 standard would be insufficient to handle, and which we would continue to test for even once it is implemented. Some key reflections are: