Will one AI company behaving more safely spark a race to the top that pulls its rivals up with it? The latest AI Safety Index, published today by the advocacy group Future of Life Institute, suggests not.
The index, produced twice a year, asks an expert panel to grade AI firms on how seriously they manage risk—from pre-deployment testing to plans for keeping ever-more-powerful systems under control. The grades are unforgiving.
Anthropic, which has built its brand on safety, held the top spot with a modest C+. OpenAI slipped from C+ to C, narrowly ahead of Google DeepMind, which ranked third. All three, the panel noted, have weakened or dropped earlier pledges to halt development on their own if certain red lines came into view, and in recent years softened their resistance to military uses. In February, Anthropic dropped its pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee in advance that the company’s safety measures were adequate, TIME first reported—a measure the panelists recommended reversing.
There was one relatively bright spot. Meta climbed from D to D+, rising from sixth place to fourth. “It’s encouraging to me that a company can improve so much in just six months,” Max Tegmark, the institute’s co-founder and president, tells TIME.
Tegmark has long warned of AI’s risks, including the possibility that future powerful systems threaten humanity’s survival. In 2025, he drafted an open letter calling for a ban on the development of “superintelligence,” or systems that exceed human intelligence, until they can be deemed safe.
Elon Musk’s xAI—which yesterday rebranded as SpaceXAI after merging with his other ventures—fell to an F, joining China’s DeepSeek and France’s Mistral. That the worst scorers come from three different continents, Tegmark says, “shows this is a global problem.”
A real “race to the top,” he says, will take regulation. He says he’s “cautiously optimistic,” pointing to the E.U.’s AI Act, Chinese rules taking effect later this month, and a more risk-conscious U.S. administration. “We’re rapidly going towards a place where there’s a global agreement about at least basic safety standards.”
The post The Latest AI Safety Rankings Are In. Nobody Gets an A appeared first on TIME.
