Is AI Security a Distraction

Is AI Security a Distraction?

And what is it costing you?

Chris Ward | Founder and CEO, Fire Mountain Labs

April 29th, 2025

The Misplaced Focus on AI Security

The industry is obsessed with AI security. Every vendor, consultant, and CISO is racing to bolt on security solutions, patch vulnerabilities, and deploy red teams. But here's the uncomfortable truth:

AI security alone is insufficient right now. Not because it's unimportant—but because we've skipped the most crucial step: AI Safety.

We're spending valuable resources protecting systems that were never designed to be safe in the first place. Let me emphasize this point: Securing unsafe systems is fundamentally misguided.

Why does this matter to you?

Because when safety is treated as an afterthought by the companies building AI, it's your organization, your brand, reputation, and bottom line, that suffers. The vendor’s risk becomes your risk.

First, Build the Foundation

AI Safety is about designing controls to prevent harmful outcomes at their source. It begins with verifiable evidence that your AI system’s controls are in place, effective, and protected throughout its lifecycle. That's the necessary foundation. Before hiring a red team or worrying about adversarial attacks, ask:

Does your AI system have robust alignment mechanisms in place—design features that ensure it pursues only intended goals?
Have you rigorously defined what constitutes a harmful outcome in your specific context?
Are there comprehensive guardrails to prevent harmful decisions?

No? Be careful, you're entering territory where security investments become superficial and wasteful, like installing an expensive alarm system on a house with no walls.

Security's True Purpose

You can’t secure away bad design. AI Security protects the controls that manage AI risk. When your AI system is properly aligned and safeguarded, security ensures those safety mechanisms cannot be bypassed or defeated. Attempting to secure an inherently unsafe system is merely addressing symptoms while ignoring the disease.

Without foundational safety mechanisms, security measures protect nothing of value.
When your AI system is properly aligned and safeguarded, then security ensures those safety mechanisms cannot be bypassed or defeated.
Attempting to secure an inherently unsafe system is merely addressing symptoms while ignoring the disease.

When Security Can’t Catch Safety Failures

Here's an example we are all too familiar with: even in highly secure environments, large language models have produced harmful or misleading outputs, without any external breach.

In many cases, the systems were deployed behind firewalls, with access controls and monitoring in place. Yet when users interacted with the models, they received hallucinated content, sensitive internal references, or confidently wrong responses, sometimes even formatted as if they were authoritative company documents.

No one broke in. No code was compromised. The problem wasn’t a lack of security, it was the absence of safety constraints and alignment controls.

Security didn’t fail. Safety was never built.

This is the reality facing organizations deploying generative AI: even with traditional protections in place, AI systems can behave in unexpected, uncontrolled, and costly ways—if safety is treated as an afterthought.

Build AI Systems Worth Securing

Regulators and stakeholders aren’t asking if your AI system is "secured"—they're asking if it’s safe, reliable, and verifiable. They want to know that your controls exist, they work, and they can’t be easily bypassed.

Securing unsafe AI is a waste. Build safe systems and products first. Prove it. Then protect them.

Like lanes on a track, AI safety, security, and assurance must stay aligned—or your system ends up in the wrong direction at full speed.

Most companies will learn about AI risk the hard way.

We make sure you don't.

Let's face it, AI adoption is risky; your strategy must start with intent. We can help your team create something worth the risk, and make security the tool that protects that value.

Explore our services to lean more.

Your Trusted Partner in AI Safety

Chris Ward is the CEO of Fire Mountain Labs, where he leads the company’s mission to advance safe and assured AI. Under his direction, Fire Mountain Labs delivers pioneering AI assurance solutions to enterprise and government clients, ensuring AI systems are deployed with security, integrity, and accountability.

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