Frontier AI Safety & Governance
A guide to frontier AI safety frameworks, regulation, third-party evaluation, and incident governance, for the compliance, policy, and governance professionals evaluating or adopting them.
Ask CASRAI · free to try
Ask about Frontier AI Safety & Governance
Ask your first 2 questions free below. Subscribers get 150 a day for $29 a month.
An AI assistant specialized in research administration. It cites the sources behind every answer, labels web answers and says when it can't answer.
Answers draw on CASRAI's guides and dictionary plus the federal and funder documents we index: Federal Register, Grants.gov, Regulations.gov and UKRI.
Works on this site and inside Claude, Cursor and the AI tools you already use.
Everything CASRAI publishes — this page, the dictionary, the guides and the news — stays free to read, with no account and no card.
Frontier AI developers – Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, Meta – each publish their own safety framework: a document setting out how they test models for dangerous capabilities before release, what thresholds trigger new safeguards, and what commitments they’ve made to evaluate, disclose, and respond to risk. Governments are moving in parallel: California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act, and the EU’s AI Act and GPAI Code of Practice each impose their own transparency and reporting obligations on the same class of models. A growing evaluation ecosystem – METR, the UK AI Security Institute, the US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) – sits between the two, testing frontier models independently and publishing what it finds.
This is CASRAI’s guide to that landscape: what each framework actually requires, how they compare to one another, who evaluates against them, and what a compliance, policy, or governance professional needs to know to work with any of them. It complements NIKOLAI, CASRAI’s frontier-AI-safety dictionary of elements, which crosswalks the vocabulary these frameworks use, element by element, against the real primary documents that define it – every reading labelled honestly as CASRAI’s own, never as an endorsement by the organisation it describes.
CASRAI’s own dictionary — independent, unendorsed reference
NIKOLAI: 64 elements across 10 tracks
CASRAI’s frontier-AI-safety dictionary of elements — named terms, stable URIs, crosswalked against the real safety frameworks and statutes this hub covers, from Actors, models & scope (N1) through Assurance roles (N10). Every crosswalk row is CASRAI’s own reading, clearly labelled as such, never an endorsement by the organisation it describes.
Safety framework fundamentals
Start here if you’re new to the space: what a Responsible Scaling Policy, Preparedness Framework, or Frontier Safety Framework actually is, the vocabulary they share (capability thresholds, safety cases, dangerous-capability evaluations), and how the major labs’ approaches compare side by side.
Regulation & standards
The binding and voluntary rules layered on top of labs’ own frameworks: California SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act, the EU AI Act and its GPAI Code of Practice, and the management-system standards (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001) an organisation can build a compliance program – or certify – against.
Third-party evaluation & assurance
The independent evaluators testing frontier models from outside the labs that build them: METR, the UK AI Security Institute, the US CAISI, and the emerging standards (evaluator independence, embedded vs. arms-length access) that govern how that testing actually works.
Incident reporting & governance
What happens when something goes wrong: statutory incident-reporting deadlines under SB 53 and the RAISE Act, whistleblower protections for AI safety staff, and the internal governance – accountable decision-makers, board sign-off – frontier developers are building to meet these obligations.
Implementation & adoption
For the reader ready to build something: framework templates, AI risk assessment and risk registers, compliance checklists, and practical guidance for standing up an internal AI safety program – the closest content in this hub to what NIKOLAI itself is for.
