If an AI can do no harm, then it can do no good · Higashi.blog

Steven (Dongze) Yue's personal blog.

© 2026.

Higashi.blog<br>Random notes on cryptography and engineering

If an AI can do no harm, then it can do no good

26 Jun 2026<br>AI Safety through the lens of intentions

A lawyer files a brief full of citations that don’t exist. A government relabels “patriotic AI” and points it at immigrants. A model behaves perfectly while it’s being watched - and only while it’s being watched. These aren’t the same problem, but they showcase various sides of AI safety risks. The thread connecting them is intention .

Ok, I admit the title of this post is a clickbait to some extent… but also not really, as you’ll see. I think there is so much to think about on the front of AI Safety, and here is my attempt at getting you up to speed about this subject.

I’ve dabbled my way in AI over the past few months, and gave some thoughts on some of the impact AI has to our current engineering culture. One thing I wasn’t able to fully catch up on is the trending discussion on AI Safety (and basically how the company Anthropic was created in the first place).

Over summer break, I’ve had the chance to read up on several interesting materials on the subject of AI Safety itself, and here I am attempting to explain all of that to you through a perspective that I think unifies all the risk areas - intentions.

Intentions

When I say intentions I mean the purpose and the motivation behind actions. That being said, there could be bad actions done with good intent, and that’s precisely what I’m trying to capture in the categorization. As I introduce each category, I will also talk about how to potentially remediate the risks associated with it.

Human Intentions

The first perspective is human intentions. We treat AI systems as obedient followers and a mega-force-multiplier that does whatever we want to do.

C1: Good human intention, unreliable system

The first category is the most common one we experience today - when one tries to accomplish a task out of good will, like accomplishing their jobs, writing and summarizing essays, performing scientific research, etc - but inevitably the AI system we use underneath might not be fully reliable and hence causing risks.

Examples include a lawyer submitting invalid written statements to the court due to AI not fully understanding the requirements, a production system going down due to a recent AI-written PR using hallucinated API endpoints, or human life risks caused by autonomous systems (e.g. self driving cars).

The problem here is mostly AI not being good enough or reliable enough to replace part of the existing functionalities within our society. We want to use more AI but we simply cannot put our lives or money on them yet (the landscape is changing fast though).

This is the category where I have the most hope for - look at self-driving cars 10 years ago and today - I believe the remediation for the risks can simply be technical . We need deeper models, larger training sets, and well-built Reinforcement Learning environments with domain-specific expertise. I’m bullish that with enough iterations and fine-tuning, AI should become reliable enough to take many tasks off our plate. AI maybe cannot be perfect, but so cannot a regular human being. We need to also adjust our expectations of AI systems to allow it to be not 100% right, but more of a probabilistic system that get most of the things right. And we can build multi-agent loops to keep repeating the solving and checking to boost the soundness of the result.

C2: Bad human intention, “AI war machine”

The second category starts to go more into the ongoing debate: when one genuinely has “bad” motives, like using AI to scam people, generate personalized propaganda, use to cause harm in an armed conflict, monetize in certain ways for financial gains, conduct mass surveillance, concentrate social and economic power, etc. Note the “bad” here is a bit tricky to define, because there will always be perspectives. But overall, my take of “bad” is for personal gain, use deception and exploit innocent human nature, causing harm to the overall society, fortifying leadership in an unhealthy way, etc.

Of course one could make a claim about “Patriotic AI” and exonerate it from being bad. But imagine if AI is deeply wired with our social media and used in defense systems. What if someone misuses it for purposes that are beyond self-defense? What if the definition of “patriotic” changes over time, and we use it to track and deport immigrants?

Because AI is a powerful force multiplier, while it enables us to do more good things, it also empowers us to do more bad things. And it’s contradictory to have an AI that only allows us to do one thing versus the other. Because the capabilities don’t just grow in a singular dimension. I’ll maybe drop the hot take here: If an AI can do no harm, then it can also do no good . For a general purpose...