Guardrails | Steering the machine: Safeguards in the AI era - by Manish Gupta

As AI becomes more advanced, progress on control and alignment needs to be intentional and in collaboration with the local ecosystem(Illustration by Nilanjan Das/AI)ISSUE DATE: Oct 19, 2026 | Oct 9, 2026 22:08 IST At Google DeepMind, we treat safety not as an afterthought, but as a core scientific discipline built into foundational architectures. Guided by our Frontier Safety Framework, a set of protocols designed to prepare for and monitor extreme risks, our models undergo rigorous evaluations throughout their development lifecycle. This includes internal red-teaming to systematically uncover vulnerabilities such as prompt injection, alongside valuable external evaluations from third-party experts to ensure safety before public release.