Safety SLO Ladder
Most teams treat AI safety as binary: either you have it or you don't. This framework provides a practical ladder: bronze, silver, gold. Start at bronze, climb to gold as your product matures.
The Three Tiers
Bronze: Basic Safety (MVP)
Minimum viable safety for early products.
Requirements:
- Content filtering on inputs and outputs
- Rate limiting per user
- Manual review of flagged content
- Kill switch for emergency shutdown
- Basic audit logging
SLOs:
- Harmful content rate < 1%
- False positive rate < 10%
- Manual review latency < 24 hours
- Kill switch activation < 5 minutes
When to use: Early products, internal tools, low-risk use cases
Silver: Production Safety (Scale)
Safety for products serving thousands of users.
Requirements:
- All bronze requirements, plus:
- Automated content moderation with ML
- Real-time monitoring and alerting
- User reporting and feedback loops
- Graduated response system (warn → throttle → block)
- Detailed audit trails with reasoning
SLOs:
- Harmful content rate < 0.1%
- False positive rate < 5%
- Automated moderation latency < 100ms
- Alert response time < 15 minutes
When to use: Public products, moderate risk, thousands of users
Gold: Enterprise Safety (Mission-Critical)
Safety for high-stakes, regulated environments.
Requirements:
- All silver requirements, plus:
- Multi-model consensus for high-risk decisions
- Human-in-the-loop for edge cases
- Compliance logging (GDPR, SOC2, etc.)
- Adversarial testing and red teaming
- Incident response playbooks
- Regular safety audits
SLOs:
- Harmful content rate < 0.01%
- False positive rate < 2%
- Human review latency < 1 hour
- Incident response time < 5 minutes
- Zero compliance violations
When to use: Healthcare, finance, legal, high-risk domains
Climbing the Ladder
Bronze → Silver
Triggers:
- 1000+ daily active users
- First safety incident
- User reports increasing
- Manual review becoming bottleneck
Implementation:
- Deploy ML-based content moderation
- Build automated monitoring
- Create graduated response system
- Set up real-time alerting
Timeline: 4-6 weeks
Silver → Gold
Triggers:
- 10,000+ daily active users
- Entering regulated industry
- High-stakes use cases
- Compliance requirements
Implementation:
- Add multi-model consensus
- Build human review workflows
- Implement compliance logging
- Run adversarial testing
- Create incident playbooks
Timeline: 8-12 weeks
Real-World Example
At Meta, we launched Instagram Calling with this ladder:
Bronze (Month 1):
- Basic content filtering
- Manual review of reports
- Kill switch for emergencies
Silver (Month 3):
- ML-based harmful content detection
- Real-time monitoring dashboard
- Automated throttling for violators
Gold (Month 6):
- Multi-model consensus for bans
- Human review for appeals
- Full compliance logging
- Regular red team exercises
Result: Reduced harmful content by 25%, maintained <2% false positive rate, zero compliance violations.
Implementation Checklist
Bronze Checklist
Silver Checklist
Gold Checklist
Measuring Success
Track these metrics by tier:
Bronze:
- Harmful content rate
- Manual review backlog
- Kill switch activations
Silver:
- Automated moderation accuracy
- Alert response time
- User report resolution time
Gold:
- Multi-model agreement rate
- Human review accuracy
- Compliance audit results
- Red team findings
Target: Meet SLOs for your tier, prepare for next tier