The 7 Factions of the AI Safety Political Universe

In the battle over AI regulation — from Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley — one term has become unexpectedly controversial: “AI safety.” After all, who doesn’t believe in making these tools safe?

But depending on where people stand on the issue, “AI safety” has come to signal wildly different things. Some are concerned about existential threats to humanity, while others are worried about protecting children and warding off mass job loss — and then there are those who think preaching “safety” is often a nonsensical excuse to shut down any technological progress at all.

“AI safety” is now something of a Rorschach test for how tech founders, politicians and everyone in between thinks about AI development. Understanding how that term has come to have different connotations for different stakeholders is a useful way to map the vast universe of AI policy and politics that has quickly emerged.

What’s perhaps most surprising is that the debate doesn’t break down along obvious partisan or ideological divides. The technology is still so young that political opinions surrounding AI have yet to be firmly locked in, and it’s possible to find skeptics and boosters on both the left and right.

Traditionally, the “safety-focused” community has been broadly associated withthe effective altruist movement, which has significant ties to much of the AI world, in particular to the leading firm, Anthropic. But even among effective altruists, there is significant debate about how best to regulate AI — and as the issue has spread beyond Silicon Valley, where many of them reside, the concept of “AI safety” has grown more amorphous.

So, we decided to ask 20 of the smartest, most consequential people working in and around the industry the same question: When you hear the phrase “AI safety,” what’s your first reaction and what does it mean to you?

Here’s what they said, and where they fall into specialized categories created by POLITICO Magazine.

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