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Table 8.1 Probability Estimates from AI Professionals and Others
| Name | Affiliation | Credentials | Estimate | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Geoffrey Hinton | University of Toronto; Google | Turing Award 2018; Nobel Prize Physics 2024 | 10-20% | Dec 2024 | “Gut” estimate; within 30 years |
| Yoshua Bengio | Université de Montréal; Mila | Turing Award 2018; chairs International AI Safety Report | ~20% | 2023-2025 | Often frames qualitatively |
| Yann LeCun | Meta AI | Turing Award 2018 | <0.01% | 2023 | “Less likely than asteroid impact” |
| Demis Hassabis | Google DeepMind | Nobel Prize Chemistry 2024 | “Non-zero, non-negligible” | Jul 2025 | Declines to quantify |
| Dario Amodei | Anthropic (CEO) | Former VP Research, OpenAI | 10-25% | Sep 2025 | Consistent since 2023 |
| Sam Altman | OpenAI (CEO) | ~10-25% | Various | Less precisely stated | |
| Elon Musk | X, Tesla, SpaceX | 10-20% | 2024 | Agrees with Hinton’s range | |
| Shane Legg | Google DeepMind | Chief AGI Scientist; Co-founder DeepMind | 5-50% | 2011 | Early estimate |
| Paul Christiano | US AI Safety Institute | Former OpenAI; founded ARC | 10-20% | 2023 | “High enough to obsess over” |
| Eliezer Yudkowsky | MIRI | Theoretical AI safety | >95% | Various | pessimistic prominent voice |
| Roman Yampolskiy | University of Louisville | AI safety researcher | 99% | 2024 | Published academic |
| Dan Hendrycks | Center for AI Safety | ML researcher | >80% | 2023 | |
| Moulay Akhloufi | Université de Moncton, N.B. | Stanford University:“Among top 2% of AI researchers” | existential threat from “Super AI” | 2026 | “real concerns” |
| Eric Schnidt | Former CEO Google | Senior Executive | “Pull the Plug”? | 2024 | Catastrophic risks in future development |
| Paul Christiano | OpenAI Board | Board Member | “4% over the next year and 15% over the next three years” | 2026 | rapid acceleration in capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control |
| Jacob Coxon | OpenAI, Anthropic | Quit AI Safety team in protest | 10% within the decade | 2026 | People inside the companies are earnestly believing in extinction |
| Evan Hubinger | Anthropic | Supported Coxon’s statement | >10% within the next decade | 2026 | “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.” |
*Note for Paul Christiano: He estimates a 10-20% chance of “AI takeover” specifically, but a higher (50%) chance of “doom” shortly after human-level AI is reached.