Can the Safety Tax Be Highly Concentrated?

TLDR: We may capture much or most of the available AI safety benefit by reserving expensive, specialized agents for the <1% of tasks that carry catastrophic risk. This would mean that AI safety work on high-cost but highly safe systems could be very useful.The standard objection to compute-heavy AI safety measures is competitive: any lab paying a large alignment tax gets undercut by one that doesn't, so expensive safety doesn't survive the market.This objection typically assumes the tax is paid ...