Safeguard-Conditioned Uplift: Measuring Utility-Risk Frontiers for Dual-Use Biology Assistants

arXiv cs.AI · 18 hours ago

Researchers introduced safeguard-conditioned uplift, a protocol to evaluate how different access conditions for biology AI assistants affect both helpful capability and harmful actionable assistance. Testing Claude Sonnet and Gemini Flash on 108 tasks showed that external safeguarding reduced harmful actionability by 0.063 compared to helpful prompting (95% confidence interval -0.117 to -0.011) while maintaining correctness. The findings indicate that no single approach dominates across models, with safety prompting working best for Claude and external control more effective for Gemini.