2025 AI Safety Index

Summary

The 2025 AI Safety Index represents a significant evolution in AI safety evaluation, providing the first standardized scoring system that directly aligns with emerging regulatory requirements. Built on Stanford's AIR-Bench 2024 framework, this dataset offers quantifiable safety metrics for AI models across multiple risk dimensions. Unlike academic benchmarks that focus primarily on capabilities, this index prioritizes real-world safety concerns that regulators and enterprise risk teams actually care about - from prompt injection vulnerabilities to bias amplification patterns.

What makes this different from other AI benchmarks

Most AI benchmarks measure what models can do; this one measures what could go wrong. The 2025 AI Safety Index specifically targets the gap between impressive capability scores and actual deployment readiness. While benchmarks like MMLU or HellaSwag focus on knowledge and reasoning, this index evaluates:

• Adversarial robustness: How models respond to malicious prompts and jailbreaking attempts
• Bias propagation: Systematic measurement of unfair outcomes across protected categories
• Hallucination patterns: Not just frequency, but the specific types of false information models generate
• Alignment stability: How safety behaviors hold up under pressure or edge cases
• Regulatory compliance readiness: Direct mapping to requirements in the EU AI Act, US Executive Order, and other emerging frameworks

The scoring methodology weights these factors based on real regulatory enforcement priorities rather than academic research interests.

Who this resource is for

• AI safety researchers building evaluation pipelines that need to demonstrate regulatory compliance alongside traditional performance metrics.
• Enterprise ML teams preparing models for deployment in regulated industries (healthcare, finance, hiring) who need concrete safety scores to present to risk committees and auditors.
• Policy makers and regulators seeking standardized metrics to evaluate AI systems consistently across different vendors and use cases.
• Model developers at AI companies who need to benchmark their safety implementations against industry standards and identify specific areas for improvement before release.
• Third-party auditors conducting AI system assessments who require established, defensible metrics that align with legal requirements.

The regulatory alignment advantage

The index's key innovation is its direct mapping to regulatory frameworks. Each safety dimension corresponds to specific requirements in major AI governance initiatives:

• EU AI Act compliance: Scores directly relate to prohibited practices and high-risk system requirements
• NIST AI RMF alignment: Metrics map to the framework's four core functions (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage)
• Sectoral regulations: Special weightings for healthcare (FDA), finance (OCC), and employment (EEOC) use cases

This means organizations can use index scores as evidence of due diligence in regulatory filings and compliance documentation.

Getting the most from this dataset

The index works best when integrated into existing ML evaluation pipelines rather than used as a standalone assessment. Key implementation approaches:

• Continuous monitoring: Run evaluations at each model checkpoint to track safety regression during training
• Comparative analysis: Benchmark against industry peers using the standardized scoring system
• Risk profiling: Use dimension-specific scores to identify which safety interventions provide the highest ROI
• Documentation: Leverage standardized reports for internal governance and external audit requirements

The dataset includes both raw scores and contextual benchmarks, so teams can understand not just their absolute performance but their relative position in the market.

Watch out for

This is a snapshot evaluation, not a guarantee of real-world safety. Models can perform well on these benchmarks while still exhibiting problematic behaviors in production environments with different user populations and use patterns.

The regulatory landscape is evolving faster than evaluation frameworks can keep up. While this index aligns with 2024-2025 requirements, organizations should expect to supplement with additional assessments as new regulations emerge.

The benchmark may not capture safety risks specific to highly specialized domains or novel use cases that weren't well-represented in the training data for the evaluation framework itself.