The Latest AI Safety Rankings Are In. Nobody Gets an A

There was one relatively bright spot. Meta climbed from D to D+, rising from sixth place to fourth. “It’s encouraging to me that a company can improve so much in just six months,” Max Tegmark, the institute’s co-founder and president, tells TIME. 

Elon Musk’s xAI—which yesterday rebranded as SpaceXAI after merging with his other ventures—fell to an F, joining China’s DeepSeek and France’s Mistral. That the worst scorers come from three different continents, Tegmark says, “shows this is a global problem.”

A real “race to the top,” he says, will take regulation. He says he’s “cautiously optimistic,” pointing to the E.U.’s AI Act, Chinese rules taking effect later this month, and a more risk-conscious U.S. administration. “We’re rapidly going towards a place where there’s a global agreement about at least basic safety standards.”