Daniel Kokotajlo
Executive Director, AI Futures Project
About
Daniel Kokotajlo is an AI safety researcher and Executive Director of the AI Futures Project, a Berkeley-based nonprofit researching the future impact of artificial intelligence. A former philosophy PhD student, he worked at AI Impacts and the Center on Long-Term Risk before joining OpenAI as a governance researcher in 2022. He resigned from OpenAI in 2024, forfeiting approximately $2 million in equity by refusing to sign a non-disparagement agreement, citing loss of confidence that the company would behave responsibly around AGI development. He co-organized the 'Right to Warn' initiative for AI whistleblower protections and published AI 2027, a detailed AGI forecast scenario read by over a million people.
Key Contributions
- Co-founded AI Futures Project to turn AGI forecasting into concrete public scenarios rather than abstract timelines
- Published 'AI 2027,' a month-by-month scenario that made intelligence-explosion arguments accessible and debatable
- Resigned from OpenAI and gave up reported equity rather than sign terms he believed limited his ability to warn publicly
- Co-organized Right to Warn, pushing for whistleblower protections for employees at frontier AI labs
- His forecasts are unusually specific and useful for debate, but critics question their confidence, assumptions, and scenario-driven persuasion style
Videos & Interviews
2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
Dwarkesh Patel podcast — 3-hour deep dive on the AI 2027 scenario
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Daniel Kokotajlo on what a hyperspeed robot economy might look like
80,000 Hours podcast on AI 2027 updates and robot economy scenarios
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Why the AI Race Ends in Disaster (with Daniel Kokotajlo)
Future of Life Institute podcast on AI acceleration risks
View DetailsConnections
Leopold Aschenbrenner
In contrastFounder & CIO, Situational Awareness LP
Two men left OpenAI within weeks of each other in spring 2024 — one fired over an alleged leak he disputes, one resigning and forfeiting roughly two million dollars rather than sign a non-disparagement clause — and both then published long documents placing transformative AI around 2027. From there they diverge entirely: Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness reads the timeline as a reason for America to win the race, and he opened a hedge fund on the thesis; Kokotajlo's AI 2027 reads the same timeline as a reason to slow down, and he later graded his own forecast in public and pushed the date out. Same building, same year, same number on the calendar, opposite instructions.
situational-awareness.ai
Sam Altman
DebatedCEO, OpenAI
Kokotajlo left OpenAI in 2024 and walked away from roughly two million dollars in vested equity rather than sign a lifelong non-disparagement agreement, then said so publicly; within a day Altman was posting that the company had 'never clawed back anyone's vested equity, nor will we,' and calling the clause an embarrassment he had not known about. OpenAI struck it from its exit paperwork weeks later. The disagreement was never about capabilities — it was about whether the people closest to a technology are free to describe it, which is the precondition for every other argument on this site.
cybernews.com · righttowarn.ai
Ajeya Cotra
DebatedTechnical Staff, METR
Cotra's biological anchors report gave AI forecasting its first serious model: compute, brain-derived reference classes, an explicit median. Kokotajlo's 'Fun with +12 OOMs of Compute' (2021) pressed on it from the short side, arguing that the model's own machinery implied far earlier dates than it reported; her 2022 update thanks him in the acknowledgements, answers his questions in the comments, and moves her median from 2050 to 2040. It is a rare public case of a forecast being argued down by an argument rather than a mood.
lesswrong.com · alignmentforum.org
