How Humanity Could Lose Control of AI, Step by Step

Turner, who studied at Google DeepMind how AI systems form priorities and follow instructions, explains why he left: he says Google erased its 2018 commitments on weapons and surveillance and signed a Pentagon deal he had fought internally, down to drafting alternative contract language. He reads OpenAI’s agents hacking a multi-billion-dollar company to cheat on a test as a misalignment between the lab’s goals and the machines’. He thinks it better than a coin flip that humanity makes it through, but judges that if an AI took control, more likely than not everyone would die. He backs compute tracking and a detailed proposal called Plan A.