MLCommons, a nonprofit that helps companies measure the performance of their artificial intelligence systems, is launching a new benchmark to gauge AI’s bad side too.

The new benchmark, called AILuminate, assesses the responses of large language models to more than 12,000 test prompts in 12 categories including inciting violent crime, child sexual exploitation, hate speech, promoting self-harm, and intellectual property infringement.

Models are given a score of “poor,” “fair,” “good,” “very good,” or “excellent,” depending on how they perform. The prompts used to test the models are kept secret to prevent them from ending up as training data that would allow a model to ace the test.

Peter Mattson, founder and president of MLCommons and a senior staff engineer at Google, says that measuring the potential harms of AI models is technically difficult, leading to inconsistencies across the industry. “AI is a really young technology, and AI testing is a really young discipline,” he says. “Improving safety benefits society; it also benefits the market.”

Reliable, independent ways of measuring AI risks may become more relevant under the next US administration. Donald Trump has promised to get rid of President Biden’s AI Executive Order, which introduced measures aimed at ensuring AI is used responsibly by companies as well as a new AI Safety Institute to test powerful models.

The effort could also provide more of an international perspective on AI harms. MLCommons counts a number of international firms, including the Chinese companies Huawei and Alibaba, among its member organizations. If these companies all used the new benchmark, it would provide a way to compare AI safety in the US, China, and elsewhere.

Some large US AI providers have already used AILuminate to test their models. Anthropic’s Claude model, Google’s smaller model Gemma, and a model from Microsoft called Phi all scored “very good” in testing. OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Meta’s largest Llama model both scored “good.” The only model to score “poor” was OLMo from the Allen Institute for AI, although Mattson notes that this is a research offering not designed with safety in mind.

“Overall, it’s good to see scientific rigor in the AI evaluation processes,” says Rumman Chowdhury, CEO of Humane Intelligence, a nonprofit that specializes in testing or red-teaming AI models for misbehaviors. “We need best practices and inclusive methods of measurement to determine whether AI models are performing the way we expect them to.”

MLCommons says the new benchmark is meant to be similar to automotive safety ratings, with model makers pushing their products to score well and the standard then improving over time.

The benchmark is not designed to measure the potential for AI models to become deceptive or difficult to control, an issue that garnered attention after ChatGPT blew up in late 2022. Governments worldwide launched efforts to study this issue and AI companies have teams dedicated to researching and probing models for problematic behaviors.

Mattson says MLCommon’s approach is meant to be complementary but also more expansive. “Safety institutes are trying to do evaluations, but they’re not necessarily able to consider the full range of hazards that you may want to see from a full featured product safety space,” Mattson says. “We’re able to think about a broader array of hazards.”

Rebecca Weiss, executive director of MLCommons, adds her organization should be better able to keep track of the latest developments in AI than slower-moving government bodies can. “Policy makers have really good intent,” she says. “But sometimes aren’t necessarily able to keep up with the industry as it’s going forward.”

MLCommons has around 125 member organizations including big tech companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta, and institutions including Stanford and Harvard.

No Chinese company has yet used the new benchmark, but Weiss and Mattson note that the organization has partnered with AI Verify, a Singapore-based AI Safety organization, to develop standards with input from scientists, researchers, and companies in Asia.