The Scientific Consensus
on AI Risk
The people who built artificial intelligence are warning us. Here is what they said, and who they are.
500+
AI scientists signed a one-sentence statement in 2023:
"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." — Center for AI Safety. Signatories include Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, and the CEOs of the leading AI laboratories.
"I think it's quite conceivable that humanity is just a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence."
Geoffrey Hinton
Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 · Turing Award 2018
Former VP & Engineering Fellow, Google · 2023
"I feel lost as to what we should do to make things go well, given the powerful forces pushing us into an accelerated deployment of AI without adequate safeguards."
Yoshua Bengio
Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 · Turing Award 2018
Scientific Director, Mila · 2023
"The standard model of AI, where you define an objective and the AI optimises for it, is probably going to be the end of us."
Stuart Russell
Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley
Co-author, standard AI textbook
"I'm increasingly convinced that this problem may be the most important of our century — whether or not AI safety is solvable, and on what timeline."
Ilya Sutskever
Co-founder, OpenAI · Chief Scientist 2015–2024
One of the architects of modern deep learning
"We are building one of the most transformative and potentially dangerous technologies in human history, yet we seem unable to hit the pause button."
Yoshua Bengio
Nobel Laureate · Mila · 2023
"AI safety is more important than climate change."
Geoffrey Hinton
Nobel Laureate · Former Google
Global platform statement, 2024
Timeline of escalating expert warnings
2014
Nick Bostrom publishes Superintelligence, the first rigorous academic analysis of existential risk from advanced AI. Oxford philosopher. Cited by Elon Musk and Bill Gates as essential reading.
2018
Hinton, Bengio, and LeCun win the Turing Award for founding modern deep learning. All three subsequently raise safety concerns about the technology they created.
2023
Center for AI Safety publishes its extinction-risk statement. 500+ scientists sign. Separately, the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a development pause attracts 33,000+ signatories including Turing Award winners.
2024
Hinton and Bengio receive the Nobel Prize in Physics. Both use the global platform explicitly to amplify AI safety warnings. Hinton states safety is now "more important than climate change."