19.03.2026

SAINTS at the International Association of Safe and Ethical AI’s conference (IASEAI’26)

SAINTS PhD Researcher Shaun presented his paper on safety cases for frontier AI systems at the International Association of Safe and Ethical AI’s conference (IASEAI’26) last month. The invitation-only event brought together over 1300 attendees from industry, policy and academia. Plenary presenters include Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Stuart Russell. The event was held at UNESCO House, Paris.

Shaun’s paper aimed to bring a much-needed safety-critical perspective to safety cases for increasingly advanced general-purpose AI systems. The paper focuses on recent proposals to make safety cases for general-purpose models themselves, building on earlier research into the distinction between safety cases for models at an “upstream” level, i.e. for the model itself, and safety cases in downstream, safety-critical contexts. The use of safety cases at an upstream level remains a relatively new idea.

Co-authored with his supervisors Ibrahim Habi and Phillip Morgan, the paper focused on the use of safety cases in safety-critical industries, the emerging ecosystem around safety cases for frontier AI systems – particularly those focused on alignment – and how developers and policymakers might integrate perspectives from safety assurance into frontier AI safety cases.

The paper brings together insights formed from deep interrogation into safety cases in safety-critical systems, aided by expertise within York’s faculty, the CfAA and SAINTS team. It applies this knowledge to novel challenges posed by LLMs. His paper is available to read online.