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Safety Compliance: Rethinking LLM Safety Reasoning through the Lens of Compliance

Authors: Wenbin Hu, Huihao Jing, Haochen Shi, Haoran Li, Yangqiu Song

Published: 2025-09-26

arXiv ID: 2509.22250v1

Added to Library: 2025-09-29 04:02 UTC

Safety

📄 Abstract

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities, elevating the critical importance of LLM safety. However, existing safety methods rely on ad-hoc taxonomy and lack a rigorous, systematic protection, failing to ensure safety for the nuanced and complex behaviors of modern LLM systems. To address this problem, we solve LLM safety from legal compliance perspectives, named safety compliance. In this work, we posit relevant established legal frameworks as safety standards for defining and measuring safety compliance, including the EU AI Act and GDPR, which serve as core legal frameworks for AI safety and data security in Europe. To bridge the gap between LLM safety and legal compliance, we first develop a new benchmark for safety compliance by generating realistic LLM safety scenarios seeded with legal statutes. Subsequently, we align Qwen3-8B using Group Policy Optimization (GRPO) to construct a safety reasoner, Compliance Reasoner, which effectively aligns LLMs with legal standards to mitigate safety risks. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the Compliance Reasoner achieves superior performance on the new benchmark, with average improvements of +10.45% for the EU AI Act and +11.85% for GDPR.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper introduces a novel framework of safety compliance for large language models (LLMs) grounded in legal standards, specifically the EU AI Act and GDPR, addressing existing gaps in safety methodologies.
  • A new benchmark for LLM safety compliance is developed by synthesizing data from legal statutes, creating realistic safety scenarios that challenge current models on compliance metrics.
  • The Compliance Reasoner is constructed utilizing Group Policy Optimization (GRPO), enhancing LLM capabilities to align with legal frameworks, resulting in significant performance improvements over existing models.
  • Comprehensive experiments indicate that state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in addressing safety compliance issues, while the Compliance Reasoner outperforms current benchmarks by over 10% on average.
  • The research demonstrates an effective method for extrapolating existing safety data into compliance scenarios, expanding datasets available for training and evaluation.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper is crucial as it sets a paradigm shift in how safety compliance in AI systems, particularly LLMs, should be approached, moving from ad-hoc methods to a rigorous legal framework. This aligns AI safety research with evolving legal standards, ensuring that future models are not only effective but also compliant with regulatory requirements.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

For AI security researchers, this paper is of great interest as it highlights an innovative intersection of AI ethics, compliance, and technical model deployment. By grounding LLM safety in legal frameworks, it anticipates potential regulatory challenges and opportunities, addressing the need for methods that can preemptively ensure compliance, thereby offering new avenues for research and development in AI governance and security.

📚 Read the Full Paper