The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities, elevating the critical importance of LLM safety. However, existing safety methods rely on ad-hoc taxonomy and lack a rigorous, systematic protection, failing to ensure safety for the nuanced and complex behaviors of modern LLM systems. To address this problem, we solve LLM safety from legal compliance perspectives, named safety compliance. In this work, we posit relevant established legal frameworks as safety standards for defining and measuring safety compliance, including the EU AI Act and GDPR, which serve as core legal frameworks for AI safety and data security in Europe. To bridge the gap between LLM safety and legal compliance, we first develop a new benchmark for safety compliance by generating realistic LLM safety scenarios seeded with legal statutes. Subsequently, we align Qwen3-8B using Group Policy Optimization (GRPO) to construct a safety reasoner, Compliance Reasoner, which effectively aligns LLMs with legal standards to mitigate safety risks. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the Compliance Reasoner achieves superior performance on the new benchmark, with average improvements of +10.45% for the EU AI Act and +11.85% for GDPR.

Workplace accidents due to personal protective equipment (PPE) non-compliance raise serious safety concerns and lead to legal liabilities, financial penalties, and reputational damage. While object detection models have shown the capability to address this issue by identifying safety items, most existing models, such as YOLO, Faster R-CNN, and SSD, are limited in verifying the fine-grained attributes of PPE across diverse workplace scenarios. Vision language models (VLMs) are gaining traction for detection tasks by leveraging the synergy between visual and textual information, offering a promising solution to traditional object detection limitations in PPE recognition. Nonetheless, VLMs face challenges in consistently verifying PPE attributes due to the complexity and variability of workplace environments, requiring them to interpret context-specific language and visual cues simultaneously. We introduce Clip2Safety, an interpretable detection framework for diverse workplace safety compliance, which comprises four main modules: scene recognition, the visual prompt, safety items detection, and fine-grained verification. The scene recognition identifies the current scenario to determine the necessary safety gear. The visual prompt formulates the specific visual prompts needed for the detection process. The safety items detection identifies whether the required safety gear is being worn according to the specified scenario. Lastly, the fine-grained verification assesses whether the worn safety equipment meets the fine-grained attribute requirements. We conduct real-world case studies across six different scenarios. The results show that Clip2Safety not only demonstrates an accuracy improvement over state-of-the-art question-answering based VLMs but also achieves inference times two hundred times faster.

With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and related technologies in our daily lives, fear and anxiety about their misuse as well as the hidden biases in their creation have led to a demand for regulation to address such issues. Yet blindly regulating an innovation process that is not well understood, may stifle this process and reduce benefits that society may gain from the generated technology, even under the best intentions. In this paper, starting from a baseline model that captures the fundamental dynamics of a race for domain supremacy using AI technology, we demonstrate how socially unwanted outcomes may be produced when sanctioning is applied unconditionally to risk-taking, i.e. potentially unsafe, behaviours. As an alternative to resolve the detrimental effect of over-regulation, we propose a voluntary commitment approach wherein technologists have the freedom of choice between independently pursuing their course of actions or establishing binding agreements to act safely, with sanctioning of those that do not abide to what they pledged. Overall, this work reveals for the first time how voluntary commitments, with sanctions either by peers or an institution, leads to socially beneficial outcomes in all scenarios envisageable in a short-term race towards domain supremacy through AI technology. These results are directly relevant for the design of governance and regulatory policies that aim to ensure an ethical and responsible AI technology development process.

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been introducing a certain level of anxiety in research, business and also policy. Tensions are further heightened by an AI race narrative which makes many stakeholders fear that they might be missing out. Whether real or not, a belief in this narrative may be detrimental as some stakeholders will feel obliged to cut corners on safety precautions or ignore societal consequences. Starting from a game-theoretical model describing an idealised technology race in a well-mixed world, here we investigate how different interaction structures among race participants can alter collective choices and requirements for regulatory actions. Our findings indicate that, when participants portray a strong diversity in terms of connections and peer-influence (e.g., when scale-free networks shape interactions among parties), the conflicts that exist in homogeneous settings are significantly reduced, thereby lessening the need for regulatory actions. Furthermore, our results suggest that technology governance and regulation may profit from the world's patent heterogeneity and inequality among firms and nations to design and implement meticulous interventions on a minority of participants capable of influencing an entire population towards an ethical and sustainable use of AI.

The field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going through a period of great expectations, introducing a certain level of anxiety in research, business and also policy. This anxiety is further energised by an AI race narrative that makes people believe they might be missing out. Whether real or not, a belief in this narrative may be detrimental as some stake-holders will feel obliged to cut corners on safety precautions, or ignore societal consequences just to "win". Starting from a baseline model that describes a broad class of technology races where winners draw a significant benefit compared to others (such as AI advances, patent race, pharmaceutical technologies), we investigate here how positive (rewards) and negative (punishments) incentives may beneficially influence the outcomes. We uncover conditions in which punishment is either capable of reducing the development speed of unsafe participants or has the capacity to reduce innovation through over-regulation. Alternatively, we show that, in several scenarios, rewarding those that follow safety measures may increase the development speed while ensuring safe choices. Moreover, in {the latter} regimes, rewards do not suffer from the issue of over-regulation as is the case for punishment. Overall, our findings provide valuable insights into the nature and kinds of regulatory actions most suitable to improve safety compliance in the contexts of both smooth and sudden technological shifts.

Indus.ai today closed an $8 million series A round for its construction project computer vision solution, which delivers real-time insights to project managers. The startup uses images and video footage from nearly 100 million square feet of construction sites to train an AI system that helps builders monitor the pace of progress on construction projects, ensure safety compliance, and reduce inefficiencies. The new funding will be used for product development and to growth the company's marketing and sales teams. "We call ourselves Indus because it's industrial AI and we see a huge opportunity in continuing to push forward on safety and productivity for industrial spaces," Indus.ai CEO Matt Man told VentureBeat in a phone interview.

CHEMREG is a large knowledge-based system used by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., to support compliance with regulatory requirements for communicating health and safety information in the shipping and handling of chemical products. This article concentrates on one of the knowledge bases in this system: the case-based reasoner. The case-based reasoner addresses the issue of how proper communication of public health and safety information can be ensured while rapid and cost-effective product evaluation is allowed in the absence of actual hazard testing of the product. CHEMREG generates estimates of hazard data for new products from similar products using an existing relational database as a case library.