Capability research also expands the safety-usefulness Pareto frontier

Redwood Research proposes that defining safety research as "improving deployment safety without significantly sacrificing usefulness" would count almost all capability research as safety research, for example reasoning performance optimization making weaker, safer models more widely used. The authors argue this criterion is insufficient: developers must choose a point on the Pareto frontier, safety research typically guides them to choose higher safety, while capability research does the opposite, because dangerous AI is more useful. The authors also note that in a future scenario where political will is much higher than today, some capability research could become an effective way to improve safety.