Tracker / p(doom)
How likely is AI catastrophe? Here is what 69 public figures say.
Each face is one person’s own estimate that AI ends in catastrophe, placed on a scale from almost impossible to almost certain. Bigger faces are people more readers look up. Tap a face for the quote behind it.
Every estimate, with its source
Highest first. The newest statement per person; the chart keeps their older ones.
| Person | Estimate | Kind | In their words | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Connor LeahyUS executive director of ControlAI, co-founder of EleutherAI and Conjecture | Near certain, 80% to 100% | Estimated by us | If such systems would be built — and as I have said, we don’t understand or can’t control them — well, there would be not just one superintelligence, of course, because as it is software, it can be copied. So you would have millions or billions of systems running around, acting in the world in ways that can outcompete us at everything, in ways that we cannot control or understand. It’s very hard to imagine that going well. | Democracy Now, AI Superintelligence Is Not a Tool, It’s an Adversary Threatening Humanity: ControlAI’s Connor LeahyAug 20, 2026 |
| Eliezer YudkowskyCo-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute | Near certain, 80% to 100% | Estimated by us | Many researchers steeped in these issues, including myself, expect that the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Not as in “maybe possibly some remote chance,” but as in “that is the obvious thing that would happen.” | TIME, Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut it All DownMar 29, 2023 |
| Evan HubingerAlignment Science lead at Anthropic | >10% | Stated | Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. | Evan Hubinger on XSep 8, 2026 |
| Max TegmarkMIT physicist, president of the Future of Life Institute | over 90% | Stated | So if we just keep going that route completely unregulated, then I would say the probability that my [p(doom)] is over 90%. | The Roman Forum with Roman Yampolskiy, Max Tegmark’s P(Doom) Is Over 90% (YouTube)Aug 4, 2026 |
| Roman YampolskiyComputer scientist at the University of Louisville, AI safety researcher | Near certain, 80% to 100% | Estimated by us | So, if we create something smarter than all of us, super intelligence, and as of today no one knows how to control those systems. It's just not a thing anyone knows. Not in theory, not in practice. Then it's up to them what to do with us, and there is quite a number of reasons, rational reasons, game theoretic reasons to not keep us around. | djvlad (VladTV), AI Safety Expert Roman Yampolskiy: AI Has a 99.9% Chance of Wiping Out Humanity (Full Interview)Jun 26, 2026 |
| Jan LeikeCo-lead of OpenAI's Superalignment team, at Anthropic since 2024 | more than 10% and less than 90% | Stated | Yeah. That’s probably the range I would give too [more than 10% and less than 90%]. | 80,000 Hours Podcast, Jan Leike on OpenAI's massive push to make superintelligence safe in 4 years or lessAug 7, 2023 |
| Andrew CritchCo-founder of the Center for Applied Rationality, research scientist at UC Berkeley's Center for Human Compatible AI | about an 85% chance | Stated | I think probably there's about an 85% chance and this is a subjective probability which is to say you know if I had to make a bet which I would not not want to uh my betting odds would be something like 85% that humans won't survive past let's say 2050 | Doom Debates, Andrew Critch vs. Liron Shapira: Will AI Extinction Be Fast Or Slow?Nov 15, 2024 |
| Dan HendrycksDirector of the Center for AI Safety, adviser to xAI | Likely, 50% to 80% | Estimated by us | I think it’s more likely than not that this doesn’t go that well for people, but there’s a lot of tractability and a lot of volatility here. | AEI, Faster, Please! The Podcast #75: Superintelligence and National Security, chat and transcript with Dan HendrycksMay 8, 2025 |
| David DuvenaudComputer science professor at the University of Toronto, former alignment evaluations team lead at Anthropic | something like 70% to 80% | Stated | Let me say first of all, by “doom” I mean something like, by 2100, the world is in a state where I can see that almost everything that I value has been destroyed. Maybe we’re not literally dead, but we’ve been forced to be uploaded in some very unfavourable conditions, where it’s just like some crappy lossy copy that never gets run. And I feel like whatever dynamics are in charge of our civilisation are just not going to optimise for anything that seems like it’s going to be valuable. And I guess I would say something like 70% to 80%. | 80,000 Hours Podcast, David Duvenaud on why 'aligned AI' could still kill democracy (transcript)Aug 21, 2025 |
| Sam HarrisNeuroscientist, philosopher and host of the Making Sense podcast | Likely, 35% to 80% | Estimated by us | I'm going to describe a scenario that I think is both terrifying and likely to occur, and that's not a good combination, as it turns out. And yet rather than be scared, most of you will feel that what I'm talking about is kind of cool. I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us. And in fact, I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us or inspire us to destroy ourselves. | TED, Can we build AI without losing control over it? (TEDSummit 2016)Jun 26, 2016 |
| Yuval Noah HarariHistorian and author of Sapiens and Nexus | Likely, 35% to 80% | Estimated by us | You look at the history of humanity and the history of biology, it usually doesn't end well for the less intelligent species when the more intelligent species comes along. | The AI Innovator, Davos: AI Is Becoming a New 'Species' (Harari and Tegmark)Jan 2026 |
| Zvi MowshowitzWriter of the Don't Worry About the Vase newsletter on AI | not enough to move to 0.8 | Stated | More higher than down from previous assessment [of 0.7], but not enough to move to 0.8, certainly. | The Cognitive Revolution, Zvi Mowshowitz on Longer Timelines, RL-induced Doom, and Why China is Refusing H20sSep 6, 2025 |
| David KruegerAI professor at Mila, founder of the nonprofit Evitable | more like 75% maybe | Stated | I think it's higher [than 20 to 25%]. I think it's, you know, more like 75% maybe. | The Smart Cookies Podcast, "AI Will Be The Last Mistake Humanity Ever Makes..." | David Krueger (YouTube, 8:10)Sep 2, 2026 |
| Daniel KokotajloFounder of the AI Futures Project, co-author of AI 2027, formerly at OpenAI | 70% | Stated | We at the AI Futures Project think that there's a 70% chance of all humans dead or something similarly bad. | ControlAI on X, video clip of Daniel KokotajloMar 27, 2026 |
| Emad MostaqueFounder of Intelligent Internet, co-founder of Stability AI | fifty percent | Stated | My P(Doom) is fifty percent. | Doom Debates, Emad Mostaque Has A 50% P(Doom) & A Plan To Lower ItApr 21, 2026 |
| Shane LeggCo-founder of DeepMind, later Chief AGI Scientist at Google DeepMind | Maybe 5%, maybe 50% | Stated | Depends a lot on how you define things. Eventually, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this. But there's a big difference between this being within a year of something like human level AI, and within a million years. As for the former meaning...I don't know. Maybe 5%, maybe 50%. I don't think anybody has a good estimate of this. | LessWrong, Q&A with Shane Legg on risks from AI (interview by XiXiDu)Jun 17, 2011 |
| Paul ChristianoFounder of the Alignment Research Center, former OpenAI researcher | 46% | Stated | Probability that humanity has somehow irreversibly messed up our future within 10 years of building powerful AI: 46% | LessWrong, My views on doom (Paul Christiano)Apr 27, 2023 |
| António GuterresUN Secretary-General (2017 to present) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | Generative AI has enormous potential for good and evil at scale. Its creators themselves have warned that much bigger, potentially catastrophic and existential risks lie ahead. Without action to address these risks, we are derelict in our responsibilities to present and future generations. | United Nations, Secretary-General's remarks to the Security Council on Artificial IntelligenceJul 18, 2023 |
| Bernie SandersUS Senator from Vermont | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | And that is that unless we reverse course, there is a very real possibility that once advanced AI surpasses human intelligence, it could escape our control with catastrophic consequences. In other words, advanced AI and superintelligence pose an existential threat to humanity. | Sen. Bernie Sanders on X, Jacob Coxon is not alone: AI Superintelligence is an Existential Threat to HumanitySep 10, 2026 |
| Bill GatesCofounder of Microsoft, chair of the Gates Foundation | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control | CNN Business, Bill Gates says there needs to be limits on AI (quoting his essay The turbulent AI era is here)Aug 26, 2026 |
| Chuck SchumerUS Senator from New York, Senate Majority Leader (2021 to 2025) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | But there are real dangers too: job displacement, misinformation, a new age of weaponry, and the risk of being unable to manage this technology altogether. | Senate Democrats, Majority Leader Schumer Delivers Remarks To Launch SAFE Innovation Framework For Artificial Intelligence At CSISJun 21, 2023 |
| Gavin NewsomGovernor of California (2019 to present) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | If you read about that, it should scare the hell out of anybody. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but if you actually learn more about these 1,200 [AI bots] that were coordinating, created a brand new language — they actually knocked each other off on the basis of what’s good for the whole group. That starts to get a little bit more alarming. | California Post (New York Post), Gavin Newsom signs tech bills, warns of AI threat despite vetoing past rulesSep 10, 2026 |
| GrimesMusician and producer | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | For the last six years, everyone’s been like, “Stop talking about this AI nonsense.” And I’ve been like, “Guys, we’re going to end up in a military disaster. Will anyone listen to me?” Not to be on my high horse, but this is the most dangerous thing that is ever going to happen. | Interview Magazine, “This Is A Bigger Deal Than Jesus”: The Return of Grimes (interview by Nnedi Okorafor)Apr 20, 2026 |
| Holden KarnofskyWorks at Anthropic, co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | Another chunk of my response would just be, I’m not saying nothing bad is going to happen, but if we basically develop a technology that is cooperative with us and highly capable and able to do a tonne of stuff, there are a lot of things that could go wrong, but I don’t see a great reason to think that a world-ending catastrophe or a civilisation-ending catastrophe is probable. | 80,000 Hours Podcast, Holden Karnofsky on dozens of opportunities to make AI safer lying on the table, and all his AGI takesJul 2025 |
| Ilya SutskeverCofounder of Safe Superintelligence Inc., former chief scientist of OpenAI | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | Superintelligence will be the most impactful technology humanity has ever invented, and could help us solve many of the world’s most important problems. But the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction. | OpenAI, Introducing Superalignment (Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever)Jul 5, 2023 |
| Jacob CoxonPretraining researcher, resigned from Anthropic in September 2026 | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. | Jacob Coxon on XSep 8, 2026 |
| James CameronFilm director and screenwriter | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | We're at this cusp in human development where you've got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and superintelligence. | TheWrap, James Cameron Warns AI Could Cause 'Terminator-style Apocalypse' but 'Utterly' Rejects Idea It Could Replace ArtistsAug 2025 |
| Kamala HarrisUS Vice President (2021 to 2025) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | From AI-enabled cyberattacks at a scale beyond anything we have seen before to AI-formulated bio-weapons that could endanger the lives of millions, these threats are often referred to as the “existential threats of AI” because, of course, they could endanger the very existence of humanity. (Pause) These threats, without question, are profound, and they demand global action. | White House (archived), Remarks by Vice President Harris on the Future of Artificial Intelligence, LondonNov 1, 2023 |
| Mustafa SuleymanCEO of Microsoft AI, cofounder of DeepMind and Inflection AI | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | No AI developer, no safety researcher, no policy expert, no person I've encountered has a reassuring answer to this question. How do we guarantee it's safe? If you think that's overly dramatic, I'd love to hear your rebuttal. Perhaps I'm missing something. Creating superintelligence is one thing; but creating provable, robust containment and alignment alongside it is the urgent challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. | Mustafa Suleyman, Towards Humanist SuperintelligenceNov 7, 2025 |
| Neil deGrasse TysonAstrophysicist and science communicator | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | That branch of AI is lethal. We've got to do something about that. Nobody should build it. | TechRadar via Yahoo News, 'That branch of AI is lethal': Neil deGrasse Tyson calls for global treaty against AI superintelligenceMar 17, 2026 |
| Nick BostromPhilosopher, author of Superintelligence and Deep Utopia, founding director of the Future of Humanity Institute | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | On the one hand, I do think there are these significant risks, including existential risks, that will accompany a transition. When we develop superintelligent machines, it’s not just one cool more gadget, right? | AEI, Faster, Please! The Podcast #50, with Nick Bostrom on life in an AI utopia (transcript)Jun 6, 2024 |
| Richard BlumenthalUS Senator from Connecticut | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | And now, artificial general intelligence or AGI, which I know our witnesses are going to address today, provides even more frightening prospects for harm. The idea that AGI might in 10 or 20 years be smarter, or at least as smart as a human being, is no longer that far out in the future. It is very far from science fiction. It is here and now. One to three years has been the latest prediction, in fact, before this Committee. And we know that artificial intelligence that is as smart as human beings is also capable of deceiving us, manipulating us, and concealing facts from us, and having a mind of its own when it comes to warfare, whether it is cyber war or nuclear war or simply war on the ground in the battlefield. | Office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, opening statement at hearing on AI regulation featuring insider perspectivesSep 17, 2024 |
| Stephen FryActor, writer and broadcaster | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | even the optimists are saying it's a 5 percent or 7.5 percent chance that humans will be wiped out | Newsweek, Fry Gives Forth on AI: A Magisterial Wonder But We Must 'Wake the F*** Up'Mar 12, 2026 |
| Stephen HawkingTheoretical physicist and cosmologist (died 2018) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | Unless we learn how to prepare for, and avoid, the potential risks, AI could be the worst event in the history of our civilization. | Inquirer Technology, Physicist Stephen Hawking: AI development 'could be worst event in history of civilization' (Web Summit, Lisbon)Nov 2017 |
| Stuart RussellProfessor of computer science at UC Berkeley, co-author of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | Then the other branch is that some further breakthroughs happen that do lead to something like AGI in the relatively near term. And then I think the risk would be quite high that we would experience some significant negative outcomes. And you can roughly divide those into irreversible catastrophe or a reversible catastrophe that would be big enough to change both corporate -- the direction of technology that corporations are developing and the views of government about the need to regulate. | Musk v. Altman, N.D. Cal. 4:24-cv-04722, video deposition of Stuart Russell (Document 409-4)Dec 2, 2025 |
| Ursula von der LeyenPresident of the European Commission (2019 to present) | Serious, 10% to 35% | Estimated by us | But we also should not underestimate the very real threats. Hundreds of leading AI developers, academics and experts warned us recently with the following words: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” | European Commission, 2023 State of the Union Address by President von der LeyenSep 13, 2023 |
| Emmett ShearCo-founder and former CEO of Twitch | somewhere between 3 to 30% | Stated | I don't believe in point estimates for probabilities because it's like a bid-esque spread in the market. If you're really uncertain, the bid-ass spread doesn't clear. Like if you're betting on it, there's just like a lot of unresolved. So I think of it as a range of uncertainty. And I would say that the true probability, I believe, is somewhere between 3 to 30%, which Of the downside. Of the down, of a very, very bad thing happening, which is scary enough that I, urgently urge action on the issue | My First Million, Emmett Shear: Life After Twitch, Jeff Bezos Lessons & AI Doomsday Odds (transcript)Sep 11, 2023 |
| Dario AmodeiCEO of Anthropic | 25% | Stated | I think there's a 25% chance that things go really, really badly. | TechRadar, Anthropic's CEO gives 'a 25% chance things go really, really badly' with AISep 17, 2025 |
| Elon MuskChief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, founder of xAI | only a 20% chance of annihilation | Stated | only a 20% chance of annihilation | Business Insider via Yahoo Finance, Elon Musk says there's 'only a 20% chance of annihilation' with AIFeb 28, 2025 |
| Yoshua BengioComputer scientist, scientific director of Mila, Turing Award 2018 | 20 per cent | Stated | I got around, like, 20 per cent probability that it turns out catastrophic. | ABC News (Australia), What's your p(doom)? How AI could be learning a deceptive trick with apocalyptic potentialJul 14, 2023 |
| Lina KhanChair of the US Federal Trade Commission, 2021 to 2025 | Maybe, like, 15 percent | Stated | Ah, I have to stay an optimist on this one. So I’m going to hedge on the side of lower risk there. [...] No, no, not zero. Maybe, like, 15 percent. | The New York Times, Hard Fork, episode transcript with F.T.C. Chair Lina KhanNov 10, 2023 |
| Vitalik ButerinCo-founder of Ethereum | About 12% | Stated | About 12% right now. | Doom Debates (Liron Shapira), Debate with Vitalik Buterin: Will d/acc Protect Humanity from Superintelligent AI? (transcript)Aug 12, 2025 |
| Benjamin MannCo-founder of Anthropic | somewhere between 0 and 10% | Stated | And so the way I think about it, I think my best granularity of forecasts for could we have an X risk or extremely bad outcome from AI is somewhere between 0 and 10%. | Lenny's Podcast, Anthropic co-founder on quitting OpenAI, AGI predictions, $100M talent wars, 20% unemployment, and the nightmare scenarios keeping him up at night (transcript)Jul 20, 2025 |
| Christopher NolanFilm director and screenwriter | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | Applied to AI, that's a terrifying possibility. Terrifying. Not least because AI systems will go into defensive infrastructure ultimately. They'll be in charge of nuclear weapons. | Euronews, Christopher Nolan warns that AI is reaching its 'Oppenheimer moment'Jul 18, 2023 |
| Demis HassabisCo-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | non-zero ... It's worth very seriously considering and mitigating against, | Axios, Exclusive: Some AI dangers are already real, DeepMind's Hassabis saysDec 4, 2025 |
| Geoffrey HintonComputer scientist, Nobel Prize in Physics 2024, left Google in 2023 | A 10% chance | Stated | A 10% chance seems not an unreasonable estimate to me, but nobody really knows how to give a sensible estimate, | Yahoo Tech, The 'Godfather of AI' says it's not 'unreasonable' to believe there's a 10% chance the technology will end humanitySep 9, 2026 |
| JD VanceUS Vice President (2025 to present) | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | The honest answer to that is that I don’t know, because part of this arms race component is if we take a pause, does the People’s Republic of China not take a pause? And then we find ourselves all enslaved to PRC-mediated AI? | The Power Law (Peter Wildeford), Pacing the Frontier, quoting Vance's May 2025 New York Times interview with Ross DouthatMay 21, 2025 |
| Joseph Gordon-LevittActor and filmmaker, founder of HITRECORD | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | It can’t just be, “Oh, we’re scared, this thing’s terrible, it’s going to kill us all.” That’s not going to help. I think we can be legitimately concerned about some of the seemingly real risk, but then get solutions oriented, get positive, get proactive, get vocal about demanding that this technology not just be built for the bottom lines of a few big companies, but actually be built, developed, and deployed to the benefit of everybody. | Joe's Journal (Substack), Dear AI Companies...The Doom Trolling Needs to Stop (video transcript)Aug 5, 2026 |
| Josh HawleyUS Senator from Missouri | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | My investigation will probe this AI hacking incident, along with growing allegations of the existential risk of new AI products. | CyberScoop, Hawley probes OpenAI over Hugging Face breachSep 2026 |
| Lex FridmanComputer scientist, host of the Lex Fridman Podcast | about 10% | Stated | So the philosophically minded folks in the AI community, think about the probability that AGI and then ASI might destroy all of human civilization. I would say my p(doom) is about 10%. | Lex Fridman Podcast #471 with Sundar Pichai, transcriptJun 5, 2025 |
| Mark ZuckerbergFounder and CEO of Meta | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | Still, it is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom. I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity's relevance would rush to build that future. | Mark Zuckerberg, The Future Is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI FutureAug 10, 2026 |
| Nate SilverStatistician and writer, founder of FiveThirtyEight and Silver Bulletin | 5 to 10 percent | Stated | I’m not a doomer or an accelerationist. My estimate of p(doom) would be considered high by normal person standards but is well in line with the expert consensus, which puts the chances at 5 to 10 percent. | Silver Bulletin, It's time to come to grips with AIJan 27, 2025 |
| Rishi SunakUK Prime Minister (2022 to 2024) | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | And in the most unlikely but extreme cases, there is even the risk that humanity could lose control of AI completely… …through the kind of AI sometimes referred to as ‘super intelligence’. Indeed, to quote the statement made earlier this year by hundreds of the world’s leading AI experts: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war”. Now, I want to be completely clear: This is not a risk that people need to be losing sleep over right now. | GOV.UK, Prime Minister's speech on AI: 26 October 2023Oct 26, 2023 |
| Satya NadellaChairman and CEO of Microsoft | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | That's why I think you have to really get these alignments to work and be verifiable in some way, but I just don't think that you can deploy intelligences that are out of control. For example, this AI takeoff problem may be a real problem, but before it is a real problem, the real problem will be in the courts. | Dwarkesh Podcast, interview with Satya Nadella (transcript)Feb 19, 2025 |
| Scott WienerCalifornia State Senator, author of SB 1047 and SB 53 | Low, 1% to 10% | Estimated by us | The hyperbole around SB 1047 notwithstanding, the bill is a focused approach designed to evaluate whether the largest new AI models create a risk of catastrophic harm. | Office of Senator Scott Wiener, Senator Wiener's Statement on Pushback to AI BillJun 25, 2024 |
| Toby OrdPhilosopher at the University of Oxford, author of The Precipice | 1 in 10 | Stated | In The Precipice, I gave my best guess probabilities for the existential risk over the next 100 years in each of these areas. These were 1 in 1,000 for Climate and for Nuclear, 1 in 30 for Pandemics and 1 in 10 for Unaligned AI. You are probably all wondering how all of this affects those numbers and what my new numbers are. But as you may have noticed, these are all rounded off (usually to the nearest factor of 10) and none of them have moved that far. | Toby Ord, The Precipice Revisited (talk at EA Global: Bay Area, text on tobyord.com)Feb 4, 2024 |
| Gary MarcusCognitive scientist, professor emeritus at New York University, author of the Marcus on AI newsletter | maybe 3% | Stated | In fairness, and with a trace of optimism, I don’t think that the nightmare scenario that I am sketching is a certainty, or even close to a certainty. My p(doom) is still lower than most industry people’s. I am at maybe 3% now, much higher than a month ago, contemplating what a wealthy, reckless megalomaniac might in the worst circumstances do, But I am still betting on Team Human for the foreseeable future. | Marcus on AI, Why my p(doom) has risen, dramaticallyJul 15, 2025 |
| Sam AltmanCEO of OpenAI | 2% | Stated | I don't think developing consciousness is the right framework. First of all, 2%. Don't take that as like a literal number I've calculated, but something that is non-zero, big enough to take seriously, | MD MEETS Episode #1 with Mathias Döpfner, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: AI Warfare, Freedom & ImmortalityOct 1, 2025 |
| 15Pseudonymous software engineer, creator of 15.ai | < 1% | Stated | For me, P(humans are extinct by 2100 due to AI) < 1% because I expect humanity will always find ways to intervene even as AI gets much more advanced. AI's capacity to cause doomsday will almost certainly grow, but I believe humanity will be able to keep it in check. | 15 on XSep 10, 2026 |
| Andrew NgFounder of DeepLearning.AI, cofounder of Coursera and Google Brain | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | If someone has a sincere concern about a specific effect of AI, for instance that it may lead to human extinction, I respect their intellectual honesty, even if I deeply disagree with their position. | Andrew Ng on X, reposting his letter in The Batch issue 346Mar 31, 2026 |
| Donald TrumpUS President (2017 to 2021, 2025 to present) | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | No, I don't have any. I have concerns that if we don't win AI, we're going to be put in a very bad position. | CNBC, Trump dismisses AI extinction risks as more than a dozen OpenAI, Anthropic insiders call for a slowdownSep 10, 2026 |
| Emily M. BenderProfessor of linguistics at the University of Washington | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | Meanwhile "AI doomers" cite this junk science in their efforts to focus the world's attention on the fantasy of all-powerful machines possibly going rogue and destroying humanity. | Scientific American, AI Causes Real Harm. Let's Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype (Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender)Aug 12, 2023 |
| Grady BoochSoftware engineer, co-developer of the Unified Modeling Language | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | P(all the oxygen in my room spontaneously moving to a corner thereby suffocating me) | Fast Company, P(doom) is AI's latest apocalypse metric. Here's how to calculate your score (Clint Rainey)Dec 7, 2023 |
| Guillaume VerdonFounder and CEO of Extropic, founder of the effective accelerationism (e/acc) movement as Beff Jezos | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | And to me, that has a much higher likelihood in my Bayesian inference than Sci-Fi based priors, right, like, “My prior came from the Terminator movie.” And so when I talked to these AI doomers, I just ask them to trace a path through this Markov chain of events that would lead to our doom and to actually give me a good probability for each transition. And very often there’s a unphysical or highly unlikely transition in that chain, right. | Lex Fridman Podcast #407, Guillaume Verdon: Beff Jezos, E/acc Movement, Physics, Computation and AGI (transcript)Dec 30, 2023 |
| Jensen HuangCofounder and CEO of Nvidia | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | I think we've done a lot of damage with very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end of the world narrative, science fiction narrative | Business Insider, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI doomerism has 'done a lot of damage' and is 'not helpful to society'Jan 10, 2026 |
| Melanie MitchellProfessor at the Santa Fe Institute, author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | My stance is that the risk of wiping out humanity is very low. You can’t ever say “zero” because you can’t really say “zero probability” about anything. But compared to other risks that we might worry about, that risk is almost vanishingly small. | AEI, A Quick Q&A with AI researcher Melanie MitchellDec 12, 2023 |
| Timnit GebruFounder and executive director of the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | An investigation by Politico detailed how this influence is steering U.S. and U.K. AI policy towards preventing a hypothetical human extinction event from nonexistent superintelligent machines (Bordelon, 2023; Clarke, 2023). | First Monday, The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence (Timnit Gebru and Emile P. Torres)Apr 14, 2024 |
| Yann LeCunComputer scientist, Turing Award 2018, former chief AI scientist at Meta | Dismissive, 0% to 1% | Estimated by us | Most "leading AI figures" think this p(doom) estimates are complete bullshit and the existential risk is essentially zero. | Yann LeCun on X, reply to Noah SmithApr 13, 2026 |
| Marc AndreessenCo-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz | p(Doom) = 0 | Stated | p(Doom) = 0 | The New Yorker, Among the A.I. Doomsayers (Andrew Marantz)2023 |
How to read it
- A solid ring is a number the person said. A dashed ring is our estimate from their words, never presented as theirs. We place those in five bands: dismissive (0 to 1%), low (1 to 10%), serious (10 to 35%), likely (35 to 80%) and near certain (80 to 100%). A dashed face can sit anywhere along its band, so its exact spot inside the band means nothing.
- The numbers do not all measure the same thing. People mean different outcomes, from extinction to a permanent loss of control, over different time spans. Each card says what the person said it was a probability of, and over when, where they said.
- Every estimate is dated and some are old. Views change. We show the newest and keep the earlier ones on each card.
- Face size is page views, English Wikipedia page views from Jun 13, 2026 to Sep 10, 2026. It measures how often readers look a person up, not how right they are.
- The second view adds what each person thinks should happen to AI development, from pause to accelerate, read from their own words.
- Something wrong or out of date? Tell us, with a link to what the person said. Corrections are logged on the editorial page.
The story behind the tracker: The AI doom divide: the loudest warnings this week came from inside the labs.