“Government officials would ask labs, hey, are your systems secure? And labs would say, yep, we are secure, don't worry. … Of course, saying you're secure is meaningless if you're not talking about what threat model you are secure against.”
The AI Policy Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
Sella Nevo was asked to explain the SL1 to SL5 security levels framework for protecting AI model weights. He describes the problem it was built to solve: labs and policymakers using the word 'secure' without saying against whom.
Transcript
…those agents need to be. Right, on all possible entry points, and an attacker only needs one. So, long story short, yeah, I think just trying to ramp up the use of AI without thinking deeply about where do I gain advantages that new creative, smarter models won't overcome won't flip the dynamic.
…about security levels for securing AI technology, and you had five levels. Maybe you can start with just giving us a high-level overview of what this framework is, what you're hoping to achieve by proposing it, and sort of roughly what it means to move up the ladder in terms of security level.
Yeah. Let's start with the problem we were trying to solve. So, when we were in conversations with AI labs, with the US government, and often in three-way conversations where both AI labs and the U.S. government were sitting across the table, we found a somewhat frustrating dynamic where representatives of the government would ask labs, hey, are your systems secure? And labs would say, Yep, we are secure, don't worry. And government officials would sometimes say, Excellent, that is great to hear. And of course, saying you're secure is meaningless if you're not talking about what threat model are you secure against. And security professionals will often really dive into that threat model and want to talk about exactly what set of capabilities are you assuming each specific actor has. But that level of resolution often struggles to trickle down to the policy world rather than the professional technical security world. So, what we wanted to do is give people, A, a rough sense of what does it mean to be more and less secure…
Maybe it might be helpful if you are able to give us just sort of a high-level sense of what it means to be at SL1, two, three, four, five. I know that there's a lot of detail in your recommendations, but maybe at a high level, roughly what each of these levels means.
Yeah. So, SL1 means you're secure against amateur attempts to compromise your systems. Generally speaking, this is usually what you get just by using standard software and using default security. SL2 is that you're also secure against professional opportunistic efforts. So, someone that's just…
Do we have a sense of where AI companies are right now in terms of security level? I know that some of that information we probably won't have access to, that it's only available to insiders, but maybe if you had to sort of ballpark it, are you able to do that?
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