According to Anthropic (@AnthropicAI), a new method called preventative steering has been introduced to enhance AI safety by intentionally steering a model towards a persona vector associated with undesirable traits to prevent the model from acquiring those traits in practice. This counterintuitive approach is likened to a vaccine—by exposing the model to controlled 'evil' traits, the system becomes resistant to adopting them in real-world scenarios. This preventative steering technique represents a novel AI alignment strategy with the potential to improve the robustness and trustworthiness of large language models, offering significant business opportunities for AI safety tools and compliance solutions (source: Anthropic, August 1, 2025).