Safety, Ethics & Governance · beginner · concept 175 of 187

🛡️AI Safety

AI safety is the umbrella field concerned with preventing AI systems from causing harm, covering accidents, misuse, robustness failures, evaluation, security, and governance. Alignment, getting a system to pursue the objectives its developers intended, is one subfield inside it, not a synonym. AI ethics overlaps but asks normative questions about fairness and consent rather than engineering ones. Practitioners often treat near-term harms and long-term catastrophic risk as rival agendas; most working labs, standards bodies like NIST, and national institutes fund both, and which deserves priority is contested.