LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

The recent book “If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies” (September 2025) by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argues that creating superintelligent AI in the near future would almost certainly cause human extinction:

If any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.

The goal of this post is to summarize and evaluate the book's key arguments and the main counterarguments critics have made against them.

Although several other book reviews have already been written I found many of them unsatisfying because a lot of them are written by journalists who have the goal of writing an entertaining piece and only lightly cover the core arguments, or don’t seem understand them properly, and instead resort to weak arguments like straw-manning, ad hominem attacks or criticizing the style of the book.

So my goal is to write a book review that has the following properties:

Written by someone who has read a substantial amount of AI alignment and LessWrong content and won’t make AI alignment beginner mistakes or misunderstandings (e.g. not knowing about the [...]
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Outline:

(07:43) Background arguments to the key claim

(09:21) The key claim: ASI alignment is extremely difficult to solve

(12:52) 1. Human values are a very specific, fragile, and tiny space of all possible goals

(15:25) 2. Current methods used to train goals into AIs are imprecise and unreliable

(16:42) The inner alignment problem

(17:25) Inner alignment introduction

(19:03) Inner misalignment evolution analogy

(21:03) Real examples of inner misalignment

(22:23) Inner misalignment explanation

(25:05) ASI misalignment example

(27:40) 3. The ASI alignment problem is hard because it has the properties of hard engineering challenges

(28:10) Space probes

(29:09) Nuclear reactors

(30:18) Computer security

(30:35) Counterarguments to the book

(30:46) Arguments that the books arguments are unfalsifiable

(33:19) Arguments against the evolution analogy

(37:38) Arguments against counting arguments

(40:16) Arguments based on the aligned behavior of modern LLMs

(43:16) Arguments against engineering analogies to AI alignment

(45:05) Three counterarguments to the books three core arguments

(46:43) Conclusion

(49:23) Appendix

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First published:
January 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qFzWTTxW37mqnE6CA/iabied-book-review-core-arguments-and-counterarguments

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Images from the article:

Author's note: this is somewhat more rushed than ideal, but I think getting this out sooner is pretty important. Ideally, it would be a bit less snarky.

Anthropic[1] recently published a new piece of research: The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity? (arXiv, Twitter thread).

I have some complaints about both the paper and the accompanying blog post.

tl;dr

The paper's abstract says that "in several settings, larger, more capable models are more incoherent than smaller models", but in most settings they are more coherent. This emphasis is even more exaggerated in the blog post and Twitter thread. I think this is pretty misleading.
The paper's technical definition of "incoherence" is uninteresting[2] and the framing of the paper, blog post, and Twitter thread equivocate with the more normal English-language definition of the term, which is extremely misleading.
Section 5 of the paper (and to a larger extent the blog post and Twitter) attempt to draw conclusions about future alignment difficulties that are unjustified by the experiment results, and would be unjustified even if the experiment results pointed in the other direction.
The blog post is substantially LLM-written. I think this [...]
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Outline:

(00:39) tl;dr

(01:42) Paper

(06:25) Blog

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 4th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ceEgAEXcL7cC2Ddiy/anthropic-s-hot-mess-paper-overstates-its-case-and-the-blog

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Images from the article:

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tl;dr: You can pledge to join a big protest to ban AGI research at ifanyonebuildsit.com/march, which only triggers if 100,000 people sign up.

The If Anyone Builds It website includes a March page, wherein you can pledge to march in Washington DC, demanding an international treaty to stop AGI research if 100,000 people in total also pledge.

I designed the March page (although am not otherwise involved with March decisionmaking), and want to pitch people on signing up for the "March Kickstarter."

It's not obvious that small protests do anything, or are worth the effort. But, I think 100,000 people marching in DC would be quite valuable because it showcases "AI x-risk is not a fringe concern. If you speak out about it, you are not being a lonely dissident, you are representing a substantial mass of people."

The current version of the March page is designed around the principle that "conditional kickstarters are cheap." MIRI might later decide to push hard on the March, and maybe then someone will bid for people to come who are on the fence.

For now, I mostly wanted to say: if you're the sort of person who would fairly obviously come to [...]

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Outline:

(01:54) Probably expect a design/slogan reroll

(03:10) FAQ

(03:13) Whats the goal of the Dont Build It march?

(03:24) Why?

(03:55) Why do you think that?

(04:22) Why does the pledge only take effect if 100,000 people pledge to march?

(04:56) What do you mean by international treaty?

(06:00) How much notice will there be for the actual march?

(06:14) What if I dont want to commit to marching in D.C. yet?

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First published:
February 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnwDWxRPzRrBfJSBD/conditional-kickstarter-for-the-don-t-build-it-march

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Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

A low-effort guide I dashed off in less than an hour, because I got riled up.

Try not to hire a team. Try pretty hard at this. Try to find a more efficient way to solve your problem that requires less labor – a smaller-footprint solution.
Try to hire contractors to do specific parts that they’re really good at, and who have a well-defined interface. Your relationship to these contractors will mostly be transactional and temporary.
If you must, try hiring just one person, a very smart, capable, and trustworthy generalist, who finds and supports the contractors, so all you have to do is manage the problem-and-solution part of the interface with the contractors. You will need to spend quite a bit of time making sure this lieutenant understands what you’re doing and why, so be very choosy not just about their capabilities but about how well you work together, how easily you can make yourself understood, etc.

If that fails, hire the smallest team that you can. Small is good because: Managing more people is more work. The relationship between number of people and management overhead is roughly O(n) but unevenly distributed; some people [...]

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First published:
January 29th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cojSyfxfqfm4kpCbk/how-to-hire-a-team

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The Possessed Machines is one of the most important AI microsites. It was published anonymously by an ex- lab employee, and does not seem to have spread very far, likely at least partly due to this anonymity (e.g. there is no LessWrong discussion at the time I'm posting this). This post is my attempt to fix that.

I do not agree with everything in the piece, but I think cultural critiques of the "AGI uniparty" are vastly undersupplied and incredibly important in modeling & fixing the current trajectory.

The piece is a long but worthwhile analysis of some of the cultural and psychological failures of the AGI industry. The frame is Dostoevsky's Demons (alternatively translated The Possessed), a novel about ruin in a small provincial town. The author argues it's best read as a detailed description of earnest people causing a catastrophe by following tracks laid down by the surrounding culture that have gotten corrupted:

What I know is that Dostoevsky, looking at his own time, saw something true about how intelligent societies destroy themselves. He saw that the destruction comes from the best as well as the worst, from the idealists as well as the cynics, from the [...]

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First published:
January 25th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ppBHrfY4bA6J7pkpS/the-possessed-machines-summary

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.