one year on
AI extinction risk is a global priority, AI experts and public figures warn in one-sentence statement
Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and many more sign a deliberately broad call to treat AI alongside pandemics and nuclear war.
The Center for AI Safety today released a one-sentence statement signed by AI researchers, CEOs and public figures: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The signatories include Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever, and many others such as Bill Gates, Grimes, and Taiwan’s digital minister Audrey Tang. The statement is deliberately broad, aimed at overcoming the obstacle of voicing concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks and at creating common knowledge that growing numbers of experts and public figures take those risks seriously.
The announcement follows months of escalating public warnings. In March, an open letter co-signed by Elon Musk called for a six-month pause on training models more powerful than GPT-4. Last month, Geoffrey Hinton quit Google to speak freely about AI dangers. Sam Altman testified before Congress earlier in May, urging regulation.
The statement is covered by the New York Times, the Guardian, Reuters, and the Financial Times.
The record
As executive director of the Center for AI Safety, orchestrated the statement to be succinct and inclusive, aiming to open up discussion about severe AI risks.
One year later — open only if you can handle spoilers
The statement became one of the most-cited reference points in AI safety policy discussions for years, cited in US executive orders and EU AI Act debates.