Evals Are Alignment Enforcement: Why Your Safety Strategy Needs Runtime Checks

A developer argues that evaluation infrastructure, not alignment research or product engineering, serves as the actual enforcement layer for AI safety in production. The developer proposes that safety must be treated as a runtime guarantee enforced through non-bypassable boundaries that check inputs, outputs, and trajectories for violations like credential leakage or system prompt exposure. The approach implements three concentric enforcement layers with hard invariants that block harmful outputs before they reach users, rather than relying on model fine-tuning or system prompts alone.