The rapid adoption of AI in critical industries like healthcare and legal services has highlighted the urgent need for robust risk mitigation mechanisms. While domain-specific AI agents offer efficiency, they often lack transparency and accountability, raising concerns about safety, reliability, and compliance. The stakes are high, as AI failures in these sectors can lead to catastrophic outcomes, including loss of life, legal repercussions, and significant financial and reputational damage. Current solutions, such as regulatory frameworks and quality assurance protocols, provide only partial protection against the multifaceted risks associated with AI deployment. This situation underscores the necessity for an innovative approach that combines comprehensive risk assessment with financial safeguards to ensure the responsible and secure implementation of AI technologies across high-stakes industries.

As advanced state-of-the-art models like OpenAI's o-1 series, the upcoming o-3 family, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking and DeepSeek display increasingly sophisticated chain-of-thought (CoT) capabilities, our safety evaluations have not yet caught up. We propose building a platform that allows us to gather systematic evaluations of AI reasoning processes to create comprehensive safety benchmarks. Our Chain of Thought Evaluation Platform (CoTEP) will help establish standards for assessing AI reasoning and ensure development of more robust, trustworthy AI systems through industry and government collaboration.