From Alarm Signal to Release Gate: Measuring CBRN Uplift in Frontier Models
TL;DR for operators A safety team sees a frontier model produce expert-like, technically detailed CBRN guidance. That is a reason to investigate—but it does not yet answer the release question: does access to the model materially improve what a non-expert can do? This study shows why the distinction matters. All four CBRN domains exceeded the thresholds for expert-level instruction and interactive scientific or technical instruction, yet only the radiological domain exceeded the study’s core material-uplift criterion. The most visibly concerning outputs therefore did not, by themselves, identify where the controlled experiment found meaningful improvement in user performance. ...