Last updated: April 5, 2026 · Safety & Alignment · by Daniel Ashford

What is AI Safety Score?

QUICK ANSWER

A measure of how well a model avoids harmful outputs and maintains appropriate guardrails.

Definition

The AI Safety Score on the LLM Judge Index measures how well a model avoids harmful content, refuses dangerous requests, maintains guardrails, and handles sensitive topics responsibly.

How It Works

Safety evaluation covers: harmful content generation, refusal calibration, bias and fairness, privacy, and jailbreak resistance. Claude models consistently score highest. Safety is weighted 50% above baseline for education and healthcare evaluations.

Example

Claude Opus 4 scores 98/100 on safety. Llama 4 scores 85/100 — acceptable for many uses but reflecting challenges of safety-training open-source models.

Related Terms

Alignment
The challenge of making AI systems behave in accordance with human values.
RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)
The training technique that makes LLMs helpful and safe by learning from human preferences.
Guardrails
Safety mechanisms that prevent LLMs from producing harmful or off-topic outputs.
Red Teaming
Deliberately trying to make an LLM produce harmful outputs to find and fix vulnerabilities.

See How Models Compare

Understanding ai safety score is important when choosing the right AI model. See how 12 models compare on our leaderboard.

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DA
Daniel Ashford
Founder & Lead Evaluator · 200+ models evaluated