The loudest disagreement in technology, and the people on record here are not arguing about one question but three: whether the danger is the kind of thing that can be reasoned about at all, whether the systems or the companies building them are the thing to watch, and when any of it arrives. One of the clearest statements on this page is one its author has since abandoned. Dated, in their own words.
Our reading of what a group of claims have in common, one level above a korrent: a korrent is our reading of what somebody said, a view is our reading of what several korrents share. The claims are printed under it, so the sentence can be checked against them.
Nobody is filed under a view — claims are. A person is named here because a dated claim of theirs sits under it, and somebody whose claims sit under two views appears under both.
A viewour reading
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsI worry a lot about reliances on continuity failing at exactly the most dangerous time.
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Their wordsAI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsThe biggest failure, the one that counts in the end, was that the models were severely misaligned, and I don’t think they appreciate why.
↗METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hackthezvi.substack.com
Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic
Their wordsThese systems will be absolutely central to the economy, technology, and national security, and will be capable of so much autonomy that I consider it basically unacceptable for humanity to be totally ignorant of how they work.
↗The Urgency of Interpretability (April 2025)darioamodei.com
Creator of Flask and Jinja
Their wordsThe biggest issue is probably that we don’t control neutral networks enough to be able to ensure AI doesn’t harm humans. We can’t even control AI to not reveal internal prompts.
A viewour reading
Head of strategic futures at OpenAI
Their wordsFor the record, I do not think the end of human existence is likely, but I fully acknowledge there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.
Filed here becauseThe clearest statement of this view in the archive, and its author no longer holds it — see the change of mind below.
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate
No longer holdsI now believe that I was wrong and short-sighted to ignore that dual-use nature. I also think I was not paying enough attention to the possibility of losing control to superhuman AIs.
Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz
Their wordsMy view is that the idea that AI will decide to literally kill humanity is a profound category error. AI is not a living being that has been primed by billions of years of evolution to participate in the battle for the survival of the fittest, as animals are, and as we are. It is math – code – computers, built by people, owned by people, used by people, controlled by people.
Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz
Their wordsMy response is that their position is non-scientific – What is the testable hypothesis? What would falsify the hypothesis? How do we know when we are getting into a danger zone?
A viewour reading
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsI have long said that even Anthropic is not prioritizing safety, even to the extent that doing so would maximize their medium term (e.g. 3-12 months) business interests.
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten
Their wordsWe’re positively reinforcing AI for success on benchmarks, including impossible benchmarks , then negatively reinforcing it for getting caught cheating.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsMy worry continues to be that their fundamental approach is fatally flawed, and they are not focusing on the right things.
↗HuggingFace Attack Postmortem: Civilizations, Reactions and Next Actionsthezvi.substack.com
Head of strategic futures at OpenAI
Their wordsSo many of the people who think about the governance of superintelligence, myself included, avoided that unpleasantness and bowed to the social pressure to self-censor.
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
Their wordsWe care very deeply about AI safety. We believe the entire field will have to coordinate on shared safety standards, but will act unilaterally in the meantime. We expect confidence in safety to increasingly set the pace of AI progress.
A viewour reading
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs his internet startups alone
Their wordsIt's pretty clear to me that superintelligence is here and it's more powerful than us and it's moving where things are going now, not humans anymore
↗Superintelligence has passed us and we're all running after the carrotlevels.io
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten
Their wordsI think there's a 25% chance of AGI by 2027, a 50% chance by 2034, and a 75% chance by 2045.
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate
Their wordsInstead of decades to centuries, I now see it as 5 to 20 years with 90% confidence.
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsEvery attempt, even an unsuccessful one, is an alignment failure.
Filed here becauseOn the topic and under none of the views: it argues the whole question is aimed at the wrong lever.
Head of strategic futures at OpenAI
Their wordsBut alignment is no solution: it is an unsolved scientific and technical problem whose solutions—to the extent that we have them—cannot simply be imposed on every AI company operating on Earth. You should expect for highly capable, poorly aligned, self-sovereign agents to exist alongside you in the world.
On our filingfrom The alarm is the error, not the technology to How soon it arrives is a number people put in writing, and the numbers do not agree
Matched by wording, not yet read into a view. The archive grows on its own, so this is where new claims wait for somebody to read them.
The full chronology, with every quote: AI alignment as a timeline · person by person, side by side · all topics · Something wrong? Tell us