Delivering AI Safety
Techstrong.ai, December 11,2025
Every new technology brings questions and concerns, and the current AI rush is no exception, especially now while we're still early in the usual hype cycle. LLMs, MCP, and agents raise a lot of fascinating topics to look into, from ethics to long-term effects on new practitioners, but for today we'll focus on safety.
AI safety is a simple concept: anyone using an AI tool - whether an end user asking an agent for help or an application developer trying to make inference queries - needs to trust that the tool will be safe to use and that it will give sane answers.
This is actually a bit beyond the state of the art at the moment! Our existing AI tools can-and do-go off the rails for no apparent reason, and it's difficult or impossible to understand what they tried and how they failed. When trying to fulfill a request, they might hand sensitive data to something they shouldn't, or they might run dangerous commands. This is an uncomfortable state of affairs at best, so it's very much worth asking what we need to change in order to make things safer.