AIR-BENCH Live: An Evolving Safety Benchmark for Foundation Models

Abstract

Foundation-model safety benchmarks capture the AI risks of their time of publication: as models improve and governments pass new AI-safety legislation, their risk taxonomies become incomprehensive and their attack prompts become ineffective. We present AIR-BENCH Live, a self-evolving successor to AIR-BENCH 2024. An automated update pipeline monitors government regulation and classifies new policies against the current four-tier risk taxonomy, either matching them to existing categories or proposing new granular categories. Then, a multi-agent, persona-driven prompt generation algorithm generates realistic, multilingual prompts with minimal human review, leaving room for improvement with modern jail breaking techniques. This algorithm is used to overhaul legacy prompts and generate prompts for new categories. In our current version, the pipeline has expanded the benchmark from 314 to 335 granular risks, with the 21 new categories drawing from 31 truly novel policy clauses across seven jurisdictions. Evaluating 14 recent models, we find a wide safety spread (from 0.17 to 0.89 among the models judged on their own behavior), that the modernized prompts are on average 0.06 points harder than the 2024 set, with the largest drops concentrated among the most compliant models, and that most models are modestly less safe on non-English prompts. By continuously absorbing new regulation and regenerating prompts, AIR-BENCH Live is designed to evolve alongside a fast-moving field.