In various examples, a safety decomposition architecture for autonomous machine applications is presented that uses two or more individual safety assessments to satisfy a higher safety integrity level (e.g., ASIL D). For example, a behavior planner may be used as a primary planning component, and a collision avoidance feature may be used as a diverse safety monitoring component—such that both may redundantly and independently prevent violation of safety goals. In addition, robustness of the system may be improved as single point and systematic failures may be avoided due to the requirement that two independent failures—e.g., of the behavior planner component and the collision avoidance component—occur simultaneously to cause a violation of the safety goals.