From nuclear testing moratoriums to AI safety thresholds
Over 33 years ago, the US conducted its final nuclear test - transitioning to a science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program that maintains civilization-ending arsenals through simulations alone, never testing them again.
New AI safety research has found frontier models achieving 70% performance on complex software engineering tasks and demonstrating potential for weaponised capabilities - prompting developers to deploy unprecedented safety controls not because they've definitively crossed danger thresholds, but because they cannot rule out crossing them.
Whilst nuclear warheads and AI systems are very different - one frozen-in-time physics, the other evolving from under 10% to 70% capability in under two years - we can draw interesting parallels with regard to governing powerful technologies through computational assessment rather than direct testing when the risks of empirical validation become unacceptable.
Will your organisation wait for evidence of actual harm before implementing enhanced AI controls or will you trigger safeguards when capability thresholds are reached?
Profiled research:
International AI Safety Report 2025: First Key Update: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.13653;
Detecting and Reducing Scheming in AI Models: https://openai.com/index/detecting-and-reducing-scheming-in-ai-models/;
LLM Jailbreak Detection for (Almost) Free: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2509.14558;
InvThink: Towards AI Safety via Inverse Reasoning: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.01569;
AI Red-Teaming Design: Threat Models and Tools: https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/ai-red-teaming-design-threat-models-and-tools/
The AI Stress Test pod is your go-to source for the latest in enterprise AI safety. We profile leading edge AI safety, security and sovereignty research, explain why it matters and explore historical parallels - drawing lessons from the past to help shape a safer future for the AI revolution.
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