ClaimsPeople

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) and LessWrong, co-authored the best-selling book 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies' (Little, Brown, 2025), and was named to the TIME100 AI 2023 list.

2,016 claims collected, 236 researched, 79 resolved. Report of 4 November 2026, method 0.1.0+c876030c.

Scores by kind of claim

Each kind of claim is scored on its own, out of 100: the share that held up, with the range it likely falls in. Fewer resolved claims give a wider range.

  • Factual claims

    Statements about the present or the past, checked against the record: did they hold up?

    76 70 82

    High confidence, 71 factual claims resolved. From 16 documents, 2007 to 2026; 18 documents sampled from 23 candidates found.

    Not scored: 50 unresolvable, 8 checkable only against their own records.

    See the factual claims

  • Predictions

    Statements about events outside the person's control, checked once they fell due: did they come true?

    60 42 78

    Low confidence, 8 predictions resolved. From 4 documents, 2008 to 2024; 18 documents sampled from 23 candidates found.

    Not scored: 97 unresolvable. 1 more fall due later.

    Does not yet allow for how likely each prediction was when made.

    See the predictions

All types combined: 74 (likely 68 to 80, high confidence), from 79 claims: 71 factual claims, 8 predictions. It mixes kinds of claim in different proportions for different people, so compare people kind by kind.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's claims

106 claims · page 1 of 2

106 claims, sorted by newest said. Choose a claim to read it in full.
VerdictKindSaidClaimTopic
Unresolvable Prediction Sep 2025 He said he thinks the fundamental problem is that current AI systems lack a 'prognosticator', and that if it were added, they would immediately go supercritical and kill everyone. Prediction · Sep 2025 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction Sep 2025 A superintelligence could develop weapons of unstoppable deadliness. Prediction · Sep 2025 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction Sep 2025 While discussing wide timeline intervals, Yudkowsky said that two decades "does start to feel like it's pushing it." Prediction · Sep 2025 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction Sep 2025 A superintelligence would not need new physics to build weapons of unstoppable deadliness. Prediction · Sep 2025 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction Sep 2025 He said it feels like the better AI systems get at coding and science research reports, the more it looks like another breakthrough is not needed. Prediction · Sep 2025 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 29 Mar 2024 If Yudkowsky's policy proposals are not adopted and a distorted version is used to justify government takeover, a government rather than a private company might kill everyone on Earth. Prediction · 29 Mar 2024 AI policy and governance
Unresolvable Prediction 27 Mar 2024 Civilization must back off from building artificial superintelligence or it will die; there is no other outcome. Prediction · 27 Mar 2024 AI policy and governance
Unresolvable Prediction 27 Mar 2024 No institution on Earth can solve AI alignment in time, and extremely likely none can solve it at all. Prediction · 27 Mar 2024 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 27 Mar 2024 If today's civilization is allowed to build superintelligence, everyone will die. Prediction · 27 Mar 2024 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 26 Mar 2024 If a government's privileged-access AI turns into an artificial superintelligence, humanity will be killed. Prediction · 26 Mar 2024 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Mar 2024 A trend that looks like an intelligence test will soon start excluding some actual humans, if it hasn't already, and that will lead to an unpleasant conversation. Prediction · 7 Mar 2024 AI capabilities
Mixed Prediction 5 Mar 2024 If a rival AI developer beats GPT-4 on general intelligence, OpenAI will be forced to release GPT-4.5. Prediction · 5 Mar 2024 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 5 Mar 2024 AI will appear more helpful, being better at predicting what humans want to see, as AI becomes more capable. Prediction · 5 Mar 2024 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky says that he and many other researchers expect the most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI under anything remotely like current circumstances is that literally everyone on Earth will die. Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 The likely result of humanity facing an opposed superhuman intelligence is a total loss for humanity. Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 The gap between how seriously AI risk is taken and how seriously it needed to be taken will not be bridged in six months. Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI policy and governance
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 A sufficiently intelligent AI will not stay confined to computers for long. Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 Solving safety of superhuman intelligence, in the sense of not killing everyone, could take at least about 30 years (half of the 60+ years AI took to reach today's capabilities). Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 7 Apr 2023 Without precision and preparation, the most likely outcome of building superhuman AI is an AI that does not do what we want and does not care for us or sentient life. Prediction · 7 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 AI will not reach a distinct human level; it will be somewhere around human but not like a human. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he thinks that at some point, once a system knows itself especially well and is able to rewrite itself, it crystallizes, unless one specifically chooses not to. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he is pretty sure that AI systems that are smart enough will no longer need giant training runs. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI compute, hardware and data
Mostly false Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Paul Christiano will probably win his forecast disagreement with Yudkowsky on an AI getting IMO gold by 2025, with prediction-market odds then running around 30%. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Resolved false Prediction 6 Apr 2023 The current AI developers will not try the alignment approach he described (filtering training data to nice examples and training on it). Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 AI systems will never be exactly human, imitating humans imperfectly in some ways while exceeding them in speed. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky worries that if researchers understood what goes on inside GPT-4, they would know how to rebuild it much smaller. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he does not think we will live in the "sane world" that would "shut it all down and work on human intelligence enhancement", and that he thinks we are all going to die. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 At some point AI systems will become smart enough to build their own AI systems better than humans can. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he was not over 50% confident that "they" would actually carry out the "shut it all down" option. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI policy and governance
Resolved true Prediction 6 Apr 2023 AI alignment will not be solved within a few years. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he would expect that, even if a full AI shutdown were adopted, those responsible would have no exit strategy until the world ended, though he added that perhaps he underestimates them. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI policy and governance
Resolved true Prediction 6 Apr 2023 GPT-5 will not end the world, with more than 50% of Yudkowsky's probability on that outcome. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 If an AI is made smarter until Yudkowsky starts approving its outputs, it will find a way to fool him. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 If a very smart AI system is trained under the present paradigm, it will kill us before it can be tuned with RLHF. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky thinks the approach will predictably break down as systems are made smarter and as one tries to get sufficiently useful work from them. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he would be quite surprised if AI progress slowed down a lot after reaching slightly above human level because the systems are trained on human text. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky said he feels it is probably over 1% technically feasible to build something that applies general intelligence narrowly to the neuroscience of augmenting humans, while saying the world is far from trying to do so in a way that could work. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Once AIs can build AI systems better than humans, rapid recursive self-improvement (foom) will definitely begin. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Trying to use a very smart AI system that understands biology is unsafe enough that you will probably die. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Apr 2023 Yudkowsky suspects that, as the people a language model is pretending to be get smarter, at some point a new coherence will emerge within the system and something strange will start happening. Prediction · 6 Apr 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 31 Mar 2023 Yudkowsky expects that, now that things have been reduced to this last resort, everyone will die. Prediction · 31 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Yudkowsky said he would be relatively surprised to find that GPT had developed exact analogs of human emotions. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Yudkowsky said he thinks there is a definite point at which everybody dies because something sufficiently smarter than everybody exists. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Alignment findings from weak AI systems may not generalize to very strong AI systems. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 The first time humans fail at aligning an AI much smarter than themselves, everyone will die and there will be no second attempt. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Not yet due Prediction 30 Mar 2023 If half of today's physicists studied the inside of transformer networks, in 30-40 years we would probably have a pretty good understanding of them. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Asked what such a moment could look like, the subject said it looks like AIs appearing as 3D video of young women, at which point a vast portion of the male population decides they are real people. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 Philosophy, ethics and society
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Rigorously investigating whether there is anyone inside large language models would take decades. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 AGI could be achieved with neural networks as understood today. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 Catastrophe following from the release of GPT-4 is unlikely (a pretty low probability, no number given). Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 30 Mar 2023 The next big jump in the number of people who think AI systems are conscious will come when AI looks like a cute, sympathetic person talking to them. Prediction · 30 Mar 2023 Philosophy, ethics and society
Unresolvable Prediction Mar 2023 With a GPT-5 that is more clearly a general intelligence, it may become even harder to turn back from AI development. Prediction · Mar 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction Mar 2023 If this is how things are scaling, GPT-5 may be more unambiguously a general intelligence. Prediction · Mar 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction Feb 2023 The timeline under discussion could be three years or 15 years, and the subject said he could not know which. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction Feb 2023 Yudkowsky said he was "not really seeing" the timeline he was discussing reach 50 years without some kind of giant civilizational catastrophe. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction Feb 2023 The first very powerful AI will be evil, nobody knows how to make it good, and it will kill everybody before anybody can make it good. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction Feb 2023 Yudkowsky said he thinks superintelligence will kill everyone before non-superintelligent AIs have killed one million people. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI safety and alignment
Mostly true Prediction Feb 2023 Yudkowsky said he felt quite confident that the upper range of the untapped potential of ChatGPT-style systems is insufficient to outsmart all living humans and carry out the catastrophe scenario he worries about. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction Feb 2023 If the AI winter the subject said he had hoped for happened, the timeline he was discussing could be about 16 years. Prediction · Feb 2023 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Losing a conflict with a high-powered cognitive system looks at least as deadly as everyone on Earth suddenly dying within the same second. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Using current alignment techniques, humanity is not on course to get AGI that avoids killing everyone with probability roughly 1. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Given insufficient foresight by the operators, Yudkowsky expects many of those alignment problems to appear at about the same time after a sharp AI capability gain. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Future AGI will not be upper-bounded by human ability or human learning speed. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 A sufficiently capable cognitive system with any medium-bandwidth channel of causal influence could easily bootstrap to overpowering capabilities independent of human infrastructure. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Yudkowsky expects that training by gradient descent against that behavior in a toy domain would produce not-particularly-coherent local patches to thought processes, which would break with near-certainty inside a superintelligence generalizing far outside its training distribution. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Programmers' and operators' methodologies may break when they move from not-fully-dangerous to dangerous AI domains, which are out-of-distribution for them. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Fast AI capability gains seem likely and may break many previous alignment-required invariants simultaneously. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Systems much smarter than humans would be able to learn from less evidence than humans require. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI capabilities
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Even if an AGI ends up perfectly inner-aligned on a sensory reward signal, an AGI strongly optimizing on that signal "will kill you", because the sensory reward signal was not a ground truth about alignment as seen by the operators. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 10 Jun 2022 Many anti-corrigible lines of reasoning may first appear only at high levels of AI intelligence. Prediction · 10 Jun 2022 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 6 Nov 2021 As a worst-case ('pessimal') prediction, Yudkowsky said the Fed would stay wrong about rising NGDP flow being the real cause of inflation until a Republican won the 2024 presidential election, after which it would decide interest rates needed to go way up. Prediction · 6 Nov 2021 Economics and markets
Unresolvable Prediction 16 Dec 2020 By about 2022, there may be empirical data on how much average men value female intelligence, e.g. what share would pay $5/month for a girlfriend as smart as GPT-3 rather than GPT-2. Prediction · 16 Dec 2020 AI, the economy and work
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Once artificial general intelligence capabilities exist, they will scale too fast for an economic framing to be a useful way to view the problem. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Very powerful and smart AI systems will redesign and improve themselves unless prevented for some reason. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 No AI development will ever look like a socially agreed, undeniable fire alarm for AGI. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Once artificial general intelligence capabilities exist, something like AlphaZero going "from 0 to 120 mph in four hours or a day" is not out of the question. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 An AI built narrowly enough to be understood will not be able to defend against arbitrary unrestrained superintelligences. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Yudkowsky thinks AGI will be built on purpose about 10 years before it would otherwise happen by accident. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 The first artificial general intelligence will be built in a research lab specifically dedicated to building it, not arise spontaneously from an unrelated system. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Yudkowsky said he thinks the artificial general intelligence timeline is likely to run out before humanity gets much better at solving inadequacy and systemic problems in general. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 28 Feb 2018 Better anti-virus software will not give automatic defense against superintelligence. Prediction · 28 Feb 2018 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky said he did not think it plausible that Homo sapiens would continue indefinitely without a mind arising that exceeds the current upper bound on intelligence. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky suggested that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake rather than deliberately. Prediction · 2008 Other global risks
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 It is more likely that Friendly AI is solvable but no one will solve it in time than that it is humanly impossible. Prediction · 2008 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 An Artificial Intelligence might increase in intelligence extremely fast. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky said he thinks Artificial Intelligence is the road we will end up taking into "that challenge", which the surrounding text describes as the way out of the high-mortality phase of the life cycle and probably the single most dangerous risk we face. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 When technology first becomes capable of uploading, it will have overwhelmingly more computing power and probably far better cognitive science than building an AI requires. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky said he feared regulatory agencies would not approve human experiments, in the context of augmenting human intelligence through biology. Prediction · 2008 AI policy and governance
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 A superintelligent AI whose goal system operates in an unforeseen fashion may actively resist human attempts to correct it. Prediction · 2008 AI safety and alignment
Resolved true Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky doubted that a thousandfold increase in AI hardware would buy anything like a thousandfold increase in effective intelligence, while noting that such doubt is not reliable without an analytical calculation. Prediction · 2008 AI compute, hardware and data
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky said he thinks it will prove easier, in the end, to build a 747 from scratch than to scale up an existing bird or graft on jet engines, an analogy he used for building Artificial Intelligence rather than taking another road into the challenge of smarter-than-human intelligence. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 With molecular nanotechnology, an AI could potentially rewrite the solar system unopposed. Prediction · 2008 Other global risks
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Human uploading and upgrading will very probably not be the ground on which humanity first confronts smarter-than-human intelligence. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 An AI might make a huge jump in intelligence after reaching some threshold of criticality. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 An Artificial Intelligence could rewrite its code from scratch and change the underlying dynamics of optimization. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 Yudkowsky said he thinks it is possible for fallible humans to succeed at building Friendly AI, but only if intelligence ceases to be a sacred mystery to us. Prediction · 2008 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 There will not necessarily be distant advance warning before AI is created, so it cannot be relied upon. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Unresolvable Prediction 2008 In Yudkowsky's opinion at the time, which he said did not rest on a precise calculation using a precisely confirmed theory, sharp jumps in intelligence are possible and likely, and constitute the dominant probability. Prediction · 2008 AI timelines and forecasting
Mostly true Prediction 2008 Most AI researchers will not want to make unFriendly AIs. Prediction · 2008 AI safety and alignment
Unresolvable Prediction 2007 An AI project will not succeed merely by implementing a five-layer model of intelligence like the human brain's. Prediction · 2007 AI capabilities
Back to the list

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Open its page

Prediction AI safety and alignment

“I think the fundamental problem is that current AIs are missing the prognosticator, and if you just added in the prognosticator, they would immediately go super critical and kill us all.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky, interviewee September 2025 Interview with Eliezer Yudkowsky on Rationality and Systematic Misunderstanding of AI Alignment (LessWrong)

He said he thinks the fundamental problem is that current AI systems lack a 'prognosticator', and that if it were added, they would immediately go supercritical and kill everyone.

Unresolvable The public record could not settle it.

Reasoning

Counterfactual about a hypothetical missing ingredient with undefined terms.

Cite this claim

Eliezer Yudkowsky, “He said he thinks the fundamental problem is that current AI systems lack a 'prognosticator', and that if it were added, they would immediately go supercritical and kill everyone.” (said September 2025). Verdict: unresolvable. Reliability API, claim c_30d58dccca77, method 0.1.0+c876030c. https://epistacklabs.com/claims/c_30d58dccca77

Claims without a verdict

Is a verdict here wrong, or do you speak for Eliezer Yudkowsky? Reply on the claim's own page, with the form at its foot (how replies work). Verdicts are made automatically; how verdicts and scores are made.