Frontier AI Safety
4.4x a year
Training compute for notable AI models has grown 4.4 times a year since 2010, about a doubling every six months.
Policy is eating the world.
As seen on
U.S. House of Representatives
United Nations
The evidence
Where things stand.
Biosecurity
36of 38 providers
Researchers ordered camouflaged DNA fragments from 38 commercial synthesis providers. 36 shipped fragments of the 1918 influenza virus.
Nature Communications, Jan 2026Ordered with law enforcement's knowledge
Automated Decisions
67%
Two thirds of Medicare Advantage prior-authorisation denials that were appealed in 2025 were overturned.
KFF, Aug 202640% to 93% by insurer
Automated Decisions
<1% appealed
HealthCare.gov insurers denied 19% of in-network claims in 2024. Consumers appealed fewer than 1% of the denials.
KFF, Mar 2026At least 262,982 of about 85m
Cyber and Critical Systems
$820m
Ransomware operators were paid more than $820 million on-chain in 2025, 8% less than in 2024.
Chainalysis, Feb 2026May approach $900m as more is attributed
Cyber and Critical Systems
3,611complaints
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 3,611 ransomware complaints in 2025, with $32m in reported losses.
FBI IC3 Annual Report, 2025The FBI calls the loss figure artificially low
The pace
What frontier systems can do, and what goes wrong.
Source: METR, Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models, Last updated 8 May 2026. Each point is the state-of-the-art model at its release; confidence intervals are wide.
View the data
| Length of task, in the time an expert takes (log scale) | |
|---|---|
| GPT-2 | 3 sec |
| davinci-002 | 8 sec |
| GPT-3.5 Turbo Instruct | 36 sec |
| GPT-4 | 4 min |
| GPT-4o | 7 min |
| Claude 3.5 Sonnet | 11 min |
| o1-preview | 20 min |
| o1 | 39 min |
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet | 1 hr |
| o3 | 2 hr |
| GPT-5 | 3.4 hr |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | 4.9 hr |
| GPT-5.2 | 5.9 hr |
| Claude Opus 4.6 | 12 hr |
| Claude Mythos Preview | 17 hr |
Source: AI Incident Database via Stanford HAI, AI Index 2026, fig. 3.2.1, April 2026 (9th edition). Redrawn from the AI Index public data, CC BY-ND 4.0.
View the data
| Incidents per year | |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 13 |
| 2015 | 24 |
| 2016 | 41 |
| 2017 | 50 |
| 2018 | 45 |
| 2019 | 43 |
| 2020 | 90 |
| 2021 | 77 |
| 2022 | 104 |
| 2023 | 168 |
| 2024 | 281 |
| 2025 | 362 |
The record
What we have published.
BriefingRevised Aug 2026Explainable AI and the limits of regulationBriefingRevised Aug 2026Why federal privacy legislation has not passedReference buildIn developmentOverturn: an agent that appeals an automated denialGovernance2026Fifteen documents on how the institution is run and fundedBriefingFrom the archiveDigital identity on a SIM cardArchive2023 to 2025383 publications from the Perrin & Fidutam record, collected in a 1,549-page compendium