@inproceedings{zhu-etal-2025-safescientist,
    title = "{S}afe{S}cientist: Enhancing {AI} Scientist Safety for Risk-Aware Scientific Discovery",
    author = "Zhu, Kunlun  and
      Zhang, Jiaxun  and
      Qi, Ziheng  and
      Shang, Nuoxing  and
      Liu, Zijia  and
      Han, Peixuan  and
      Su, Yue  and
      Yu, Haofei  and
      You, Jiaxuan",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.116/",
    pages = "2289--2317",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Recent advancements in large language model (LLM) agents have significantly accelerated scientific discovery automation, yet concurrently raised critical ethical and safety concerns. To systematically address these challenges, we introduce **SafeScientist**, an innovative AI scientist framework explicitly designed to enhance safety and ethical responsibility in AI-driven scientific exploration. SafeScientist proactively refuses ethically inappropriate or high-risk tasks and rigorously emphasizes safety throughout the research process. To achieve comprehensive safety oversight, we integrate multiple defensive mechanisms, including prompt monitoring, agent-collaboration monitoring, tool-use monitoring, and an ethical reviewer component. Complementing SafeScientist, we propose **SciSafetyBench** , a novel benchmark specifically designed to evaluate AI safety in scientific contexts, comprising 240 high-risk scientific tasks across 6 domains, alongside 30 specially designed scientific tools and 120 tool-related risk tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SafeScientist significantly improves safety performance by 35{\%} compared to traditional AI scientist frameworks, without compromising scientific output quality. Additionally, we rigorously validate the robustness of our safety pipeline against diverse adversarial attack methods, further confirming the effectiveness of our integrated approach. The code and data will be available at https://github.com/ulab-uiuc/SafeScientist.**Warning**: this paper contains example data that may be offensive or harmful."
}