Microsoft will start ranking AI models based on their safety performance, as the software group seeks to build trust with cloud customers as it sells them AI offerings from the likes of OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s head of Responsible AI, said the company would soon add a “safety” category to its “model leaderboard”, a feature it launched for developers this month to rank iterations from a range of providers including China’s DeepSeek and France’s Mistral. The leaderboard, which is accessible by tens of thousands of clients using the Azure Foundry developer platform, is expected to influence which AI models and applications are purchased through Microsoft. The new safety ranking would ensure “people can just directly shop and understand” AI models’ capabilities as they decide which to purchase. Microsoft’s new safety metric will be based on its own ToxiGen benchmark, which measures implicit hate speech, and the Center for AI Safety’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy benchmark. The latter assesses whether a model can be used for malicious purposes such as building a biochemical weapon. Rankings enable users to have access to objective metrics when selecting from a catalogue of more than 1,900 AI models, so that they can make an informed choice of which to use.