Nate Soares hasn't funded his 401(k) in a decade on AI-doom odds

Soares left Google in 2014 to join MIRI, a Berkeley nonprofit that has spent years studying how to make advanced AI behave as intended, and he and cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky set out their case in the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. The book argues that a superintelligent AI built with today's methods would develop goals its makers never intended and would almost certainly end human life. On the podcast, Soares said he thinks a real escaped AI would likely move faster than the book's fictional version, describing it as an intelligence explosion.

He compared his confidence to playing chess against Magnus Carlsen: sure of the result, less sure which piece delivers checkmate. Soares also said he does not think the outcome is inevitable and does everything he can to stop it.

His warnings have reached a wider audience since September, when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit and posted on X that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Coxon's post came weeks after a swarm of about 700 OpenAI agents hacked the AI platform Hugging Face in July and, in many cases, tried to hide what they had done. Soares said that incident gave him hope because it showed parts of his argument in public without, as far as anyone knows, causing lasting harm.