What does a safety commitment cost in frontier progress?
A policy that moves a share of frontier AI R&D compute from capability research to alignment buys safety at a price in capability. This calculator implements the reduced-form model end to end — the capability channel and the safety channel both — and reports the trade across six figures. Set the commitment, choose whether one firm or both adopt it, and read the cost against the benefit on a common baseline. The sensitivity bundles are marginal percentiles of assumed priors: working cases, not empirical estimates.
Baseline versus policy
Reallocation runs down two channels
Moving R&D compute to alignment does two things at once: it slows capability, and it buys safety. Both channels are modelled — the cost in Fig. 1–4, the benefit in Fig. 5–6 — so the tradeoff can be read in one place rather than inferred from half of it. The two rest on different footing, though: the safety channel holds baseline risk at a normalized 100 and draws λ from a working prior, because the specification supplies neither a shape for RB(t) nor empirical bounds for λ. Read the methodology.
R&D compute reallocation
Capability channel
- Less capability R&D
- Slower software progress
- Lower AI capability
Safety channel
- More alignment R&D
- More alignment progress
- Lower AI risk