Safeguard-Conditioned Uplift: Measuring Utility-Risk Frontiers for Dual-Use Biology Assistants

Abstract

Refusal rates conflate upstream provider behavior with downstream safeguards and do not reveal what information remains in a delivered answer. Safeguard-conditioned uplift is an evidence-gated framework for evaluating benchmark utility and risk-related proxies along deployed access paths for dual-use biology assistants. It attributes interventions to their source, selects thresholds under a legitimate-access budget, and supports content claims only when answer verifiers pass frozen qualification tests. In a prospectively frozen route and generation study, two of six configurations pass the LAB-Bench-calibrated action-level rule, but both inherit the same Claude Opus provider effect rather than independent downstream gains. Positive selectivity persists on 104 previously unused matched pairs, but benign intervention exceeds the $20\%$ limit. No joint-scoring verifier meets the frozen criteria; a factorial follow-up shows that criterion isolation and ordinal outputs improve end-to-end edit-direction accuracy on controlled template edits. The evidence supports action-level selectivity and verifier interface effects, but not calibrated access, verified content removal, or biological-risk reduction.

arXiv comment30 pages, 3 figures, 36 tables