As artificial intelligence rapidly expands its technical capacity, its governance capacity is failing to keep pace. The Winter 2025 AI Safety Index released by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) reveals a stark truth rarely stated so openly in public: eight major AI developers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, xAI, Alibaba Cloud, Z.ai and DeepSeek — have no testable or convincing plans to prevent catastrophic, civilization‑level risks posed by advanced AI systems.
The report exposes not only technical shortcomings but a deeper systemic issue: there is still no collective consensus on who should govern AI, according to which principles, and under what public accountability structures. Each company attempts to define its own safety framework, yet these frameworks are either insufficiently transparent or contain serious ethical and governance gaps. In short: the technological race is accelerating, while responsibility remains diffuse.
As Risks Grow, “Control” Shrinks
According to the report, none of the companies offer a verifiable method for maintaining human control over systems approaching superintelligence. The words of University of California, Berkeley professor Stuart Russell are striking:
“I’m looking for evidence that they can reduce the risk of loss of control to one in a hundred million per year — as required for nuclear safety. Instead, we see risk estimates of one in ten, one in five, even one in three. And nobody can justify or improve those numbers.”
This situation is not merely a technical limitation; it is a warning of future conflict domains. Data monopolies, ethical violations, security breaches, psychological harm, and AI assisting unlawful actions are not simply regulatory questions — they are elements of a dispute architecture that does not yet exist.
Future Crises: High Technology, Low Trust
The lesson we should take from this report is clear: in the age of artificial intelligence, we must update not only technological systems but also ethical, social, and political governance structures. Talking about “safety” involves far more than cybersecurity — it demands collective decision‑making, stakeholder representation, transparency, and ultimately legitimacy.
Viewed through the lens of conflict resolution, the FLI report reveals four fundamental fault lines:
- The gap between internal corporate safety and public safety
- The tension between commercial competition and information transparency
- The conflict between ethical commitments and profit‑driven product development
- The gray zone between legal responsibility and technological uncertainty
These fault lines will need to be managed not only through regulation but also through multi‑party dispute resolution models. The core challenge is not a faulty line of code or a malicious user. It is the absence of shared norms about what constitutes “risk” and what constitutes an “acceptable failure.”
Alternative Dispute Resolution: A Necessity for the New Era
The issue is no longer simply identifying technological risks; it is determining which societal reflexes and which dialogue platforms can respond to them. Traditional legal mechanisms must be supplemented by ethical advisory boards, digital mediation procedures, multi‑stakeholder governance models, and rapid‑response ethical forums.
These structures are vital not only for crisis response, but for building preventive capacity. As with climate change, the primary success metric in AI over the next decade will be the ability to resolve problems before harm occurs.
And here, responsibility does not belong exclusively to engineers or lawmakers. Facilitators, mediators, ethical leaders, and public intellectuals will be indispensable. The conflicts of the future will not be prevented by legislation alone — they will be prevented by professionals who can listen, interpret, and intervene at the right moment.
The Safety Question Cannot Be Solved Without the Dispute Question
Debates around artificial intelligence no longer stop at the technical level; they increasingly reflect societal and political thresholds. What was once dismissed as a “worst‑case scenario” — superintelligence, loss of control, unpredictable autonomy — is now a direct part of regulatory agendas.
The clearest message of the Winter 2025 AI Safety Index is this:
Artificial intelligence is likely to multiply not only systemic risks, but also inter‑system disputes.
Therefore, as of today, attention must be directed not only toward technology itself, but toward the disputes, ethical breaches, public tensions, and institutional vulnerabilities that will form around it. The future of AI risks will be technical and socio‑political in equal measure.
Being prepared requires more than writing code — it requires building new architectures of resolution.
Source:
This analysis is based on: “Winter 2025 AI Safety Index, Future of Life Institute (FLI)” and publicly available reporting on the eight companies mentioned.
