Towards technical best practice for frontier AI development

On 22 September, the Prime Minister set out steps the UK is taking to ensure AI delivers on its vast potential for good. These include a commitment to work towards principles and standards that ensure the most capable AI systems are developed securely and with appropriate transparency. The AI Security Institute (AISI) will play a key role in delivering that commitment, with partners across industry, governments and beyond.

This work responds to continued, rapid AI capability progress in recent months. That progress promises a wide range of benefits, but it has also outpaced several practices used to manage risk and oversee frontier systems – especially with risks now emerging earlier, during AI development itself.

Here we set out AISI’s view of these challenges and the new technical practices and controls most urgently needed to address them. We draw on three years of experience testing, evaluating and researching frontier AI models, in partnership with industry and other technical authorities such as the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence. We also explain how we aim to work with developers and others to help establish best practice that could later inform formal technical standards.

AISI is not seeking to mandate requirements for frontier developers, but to contribute our expertise to an industry-wide effort to advance technical standards and best practice. We welcome leading developers’ recent commitments to that effort, including through the White House Accord on Super Intelligence.

Much of how frontier developers manage risk today is voluntary. Developers publish safety frameworks, share models with third parties for pre-release evaluation and, most recently, have begun embedding third-party evaluators.

AISI has helped establish these practices. Working with industry, we have independently evaluated more than 55 models before release, developed principles for safeguards evaluation, helped shape risk assessments and safety frameworks , and jointly tested agent control monitors.