Doom Debates!

Dr. Holly Elmore is the founder and executive director of PauseAI US and holds a Harvard PhD in evolutionary biology. She’s back, and this time she’s taking on none other than Eliezer Yudkowsky!

She argues his public behavior is alienating the people PauseAI US needs to reach, but I wonder if she’s asking too much of the man who laid the foundation for the AI safety movement.

We also clash over Yudkowsky’s coherent extrapolated volition. She thinks the theory doesn’t properly factor in humanity’s consent, but I argue that’s already embedded into the CEV framework.

Holly and I dive into the rationalists’ involvement in a controversial kink scene, John Wentworth’s defunding news, transhumanism, pacing the frontier, and “Holly’s Basilisk”—her case for sending AI lab employees to jail.

It’s another great episode with one of the most controversial—and thoughtful—thinkers in AI safety. Enjoy!

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jn8mS3kC-SU

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:09 — Holly Elmore and PauseAI’s Political Breakthrough

00:07:36 — Pause AI vs. “Pacing the Frontier”

00:14:17 — Holly’s Case Against Eliezer Yudkowsky

00:16:20 — Coherent Extrapolated Volition and Pivotal Acts

00:31:19 — Brain Copies, Consent, and Self-Determination

00:36:56 — Transhumanism, Dyson Swarms, and Humanity’s Future

00:45:36 — The Missing Democratic Checkpoint

00:51:04 — Yudkowsky’s Role in Accelerating AI

01:02:48 — Genius, Arrogance, and Rationalist Culture

01:10:14 — The Aella Photo and Holly’s Breaking Point

01:20:21 — John Wentworth’s Grant Controversy

01:28:17 — PauseAI US’s Rules and Red Lines

01:32:05 — Poe’s Law and the Cost of Sarcasm

01:36:18 — Holly’s Case for Jailing AI Developers

Links

Donate to PauseAI US

Holly on X

Holly’s Substack

Pacing the Frontier letter

Jacob Coxon’s resignation post

PauseAI leadership disendorsement letter, reproduced on LessWrong

Holly on movement infighting — No, the Judean People’s Front should not just get along with the People’s Front of Judea

Coherent Extrapolated Volition — Eliezer Yudkowsky (2004 PDF)

Pivotal act — Eliezer Yudkowsky (Arbital mirror)

Genes did misalignment first — Holly Elmore

Holly’s reaction to the Yudkowsky/Aella photo

On Kink & Status in the Rationalist Community — John Wentworth (October 8 response)

Holly’s basilisk

Are We a Circular Firing Squad? — previous Holly Elmore episode

Let’s Call Out the AI Doom Enablers — previous Holly Elmore episode

Join the Doom Debates Discord

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered.

Read Sarah’s Substack: https://longerramblings.substack.com

Join PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbHCKwuMrk

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:41 — Introducing Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse

00:02:06 — How a Humanities Grad Got AGI-Pilled

00:08:40 — Whose Timelines Do You Trust?

00:11:32 — Joining the UK AI Security Institute

00:15:47 — What AISI Actually Does

00:19:23 — Verifying Anthropic’s Mythos Claims

00:21:59 — Leaving Government to Speak Freely

00:23:22 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:25:37 — Yudkowsky, EA, and Keeping Your Identity Small

00:32:08 — Is Anthropic Doing Enough to Call for a Slowdown?

00:35:56 — Can You Do AI Safety from Second Place?

00:39:20 — Hugging Face and the Vibe Shift

00:44:02 — Is Everything Weird Yet?

00:48:27 — Prevent Recursive Self-Improvement, Don’t Ban It

00:52:28 — Build the Speed Dial, Not the Pause Button

00:56:54 — Was Calling for a Pause in 2023 a Mistake?

01:01:22 — Turning Up the Fear Dial

01:04:23 — Donation Drive

01:05:11 — PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction

Links

SARAH HASTINGS-WOODHOUSE

Sarah’s Substack

Sarah on X (@littIeramblings)

Consistently Candid — Sarah’s podcast

“What is recursive self-improvement and what would it mean to ban it?” — Sarah’s RSI post (Oct 1, 2026)

“Is everything weird yet?” (Aug 30, 2026)

“What the hell just happened?” — on AI safety’s viral moment (Sep 18, 2026)

“We have been warned” — the Hugging Face hack as a warning shot (Jul 27, 2026)

“The pause-shaped hole in ‘Policy on the AI Exponential’” — is Anthropic doing enough to call for a slowdown? (Jun 19, 2026)

Sarah’s 2023 thread on stumbling into the world of AI doom (“I’m angry because I love the world”)

“The other night I successfully AGI-pilled a man on a first date”

“Welcome, and also I’m sorry” — Sarah’s note to AI safety newcomers (Sep 11, 2026)

“‘We’re all f*cked and it’s totally hopeless’ is almost as bad of a meme to be spreading” (Feb 12, 2025)

REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

“Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities” — AISI (Apr 13, 2026)

AISI Frontier AI Trends Report (Dec 2025)

“The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI” — AISI Human Influence team

US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — NIST

“Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build” — MIT Technology Review (May 2023)

“We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky” — Bankless (2023)

“GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence” — Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (Feb 2019)

“AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities” — Eliezer Yudkowsky

“Keep Your Identity Small” — Paul Graham

Pacing the Frontier — the open letter signed by 1,300+ frontier lab employees

“You can’t do safety from second place” — Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy (Sep 29, 2026)

Ezra Klein’s op-ed calling for a ban on recursive self-improvement — The New York Times (Sep 20, 2026)

“Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?” — Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (Sep 22, 2026)

PauseAI UK

March Against AI Extinction — PauseAI UK, London, November 21, 2026

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

Top Economist Sees AI Doom Coming — Dr. Peter Berezin, BCA Research

Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained)

DOOM DEBATES

Donate to Doom Debates

Join the Doom Debates Discord

Transcript, links, and show notes: https://doomdebates.com/p/ai-has-become-profoundly-weird

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Bestselling author Robert Wright and I are back for round two of our collaboration, reacting to the week in AI. We cover Trump's summit with the AI labs, the FTC's investigation of OpenAI & Anthropic, the latest Gemini announcement, and much more. The Overton window is moving fast, but is the AI moving faster?

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-rc6swhQs

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:21 — Round Two of Nonzero × Doom Debates

00:01:23 — Trump, the FTC, and an Industry Feeling the Heat

00:05:37 — Google Says Gemini 4 Exists

00:07:41 — Greg Brockman Pulls His $25M from Leading the Future

00:12:53 — The Break-Ins Keep Coming

00:15:23 — The Market Wants Agent Swarms

00:18:30 — The End of “Alignment by Default”

00:20:55 — The Prelude to Recursive Self-Improvement

00:26:14 — David Sacks Can’t Explain Dario

00:30:31 — The All-In Echo Chamber

00:33:47 — Scott Alexander vs. Steven Pinker

00:38:37 — Jason Calacanis vs. the Public Benefit Corporation

00:43:03 — The Elephant in the Room Is the AI

00:46:21 — What the Average American Thinks

00:48:17 — From Chatbot to Agent to Swarm

00:54:20 — Boeing, Agent Swarms, and the Off Switch

00:57:07 — Skynet as a Botnet That Trades With Us

01:00:32 — Tyler Cowen: National Treasure, Net Negative on AI

01:04:01 — Liron’s Doomer DCF Yields a 20x P/E

01:07:11 — Interest Rates: Where Cowen Has Me

01:09:12 — Does Pinker Owe Us a Debate?

01:12:48 — Pinker vs. Instrumental Convergence

01:17:00 — Wrap-Up

Links

ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO

Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift”

Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter

Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter)

The God Test — Bob’s book on AI; Chapter 14, “Enlightenment Now,” is the Steven Pinker chapter

“The Singularity Is Clear” — Bob’s essay in installments on recursive self-improvement (Parts I–III)

“AI and the New McCarthyism” — Bob on the pro-AI lobby smearing Sanders, Tegmark, and Krueger as China stooges (Nonzero, May 2026)

Why Buddhism Is True — Bob’s 2017 book

THE WEEK IN AI

AI’s biggest players promise to police themselves at the White House — Fortune on the “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities”

Major White House split on AI policy leaks as top aides freak out — The Daily Beast on the Sacks–Wiles rift

FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over possible risks to consumers — AP

“We Must Pace the Frontier” — Dario Amodei’s call to slow down (with the China caveat and chip controls)

China rejects Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development — Rest of World

Google rolls out new Gemini model but restricts access over safety concerns — The Guardian

GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities — Anthropic on Zhipu’s open-weight model

OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC — The New York Times

Sanders convenes Chinese and American computer scientists to warn of threat from AI — Broadband Breakfast

THE BREAK-INS AND THE AGENT SWARM

METR: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident

Chris Painter’s testimony to the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents — METR, Sept 30, 2026

SwarmTraces: how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face — forensic report co-authored by Palisade Research

OpenAI confirms ‘wiki incident’ — TechCrunch on the German wiki agent message board

Are Current AI Safety Techniques Enough? Adam Gleave vs. Oliver Habryka — FAR.AI debate

Alignment faking in large language models — Anthropic

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI

Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess)

Pacing the Frontier — the AI lab employees’ letter

THE ALL-IN PODCAST

All-In: Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails — the episode we react to

Helen Toner: letting OpenAI be destroyed “would actually be consistent with the mission” — The Decoder, Dec 2023

Garfield Minus Garfield

PINKER, SCOTT ALEXANDER, AND TYLER COWEN

Scott Alexander challenges Steven Pinker to a public AI-doom debate ($5,000 vs. $1,000)

An Open Letter to Scott Alexander — Steven Pinker declines the debate as a “spectator sport,” Quillette

Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True — the anonymous Astral Codex Ten review Bob mentions

Mistakes in financial economics — Tyler Cowen: doomers should be buying puts (Marginal Revolution)

Liron’s answer: a doomer DCF yields the S&P’s 20x forward P/E

ALSO MENTIONED

Obsolete — Garrison Lovely’s book (with Bob’s blurb)

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

Nonzero × Doom Debates, Episode 1 — Did AI Doom Just Go Mainstream?

Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of “Obsolete”

OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown

DOOM DEBATES

Join the Doom Debates Discord

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Garrison Lovely is an award-winning journalist and author of the highly anticipated book, Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us and How to Stop It. I give it the Doom Debates stamp of approval!

While we’re mostly on the same page about the AI arms race, Garrison and I clash over Eliezer Yudkowsky’s role. He blames Eliezer for kicking off the superintelligence race and refers to his Coherent Extrapolated Volition (CEV) vision as a “coup on humanity.” But I say it was actually Yud’s attempt to keep humanity in charge.

Can Garrison change my mind?

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ94J4DBRkw

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:05 — Introducing Garrison Lovely

00:04:23 — “Freeze AI” vs. “Pause AI”

00:06:17 — Garrison’s Background at McKinsey

00:10:31 — Should ICE Be Abolished?

00:17:07 — How Garrison Got on the AI Beat

00:22:16 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:23:29 — Focusing on Extinction Is a Distraction

00:25:46 — Is Stopping AI an Easy Coordination Problem?

00:29:02 — Society’s Immune Response to AI

00:33:54 — Garrison’s P(Extinction) by 2050

00:37:09 — Did Eliezer Yudkowsky Start the AI Race?

00:45:56 — Freeze AGI Until the Public Opts In

00:50:32 — Is Coherent Extrapolated Volition a Coup?

01:02:17 — Democracy, Informed Consent, and the Singularity

01:11:39 — Should Eliezer Have Raised the Alarm Sooner?

01:16:45 — “Classic” AI Safety Burned Its Credibility

01:19:18 — Garrison’s Proposal to Stop the Race

01:21:35 — Will China Agree to a Freeze?

01:25:14 — Let’s Stop the “Obsoleting Project”

01:26:00 — Wrap-Up

Links

GARRISON LOVELY

“Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us—and How to Stop It” — Garrison’s book

Obsolete — Garrison’s Substack

Garrison Lovely on X

Organize Against the Machine — Garrison’s new podcast with labor organizer Cassie Pritchard

“Can Humanity Survive AI?” — Garrison’s Jacobin cover story

“McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners” — Garrison’s Current Affairs essay

REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration — Bryan Caplan

“The AI Revolution: Our Immortality or Extinction” — Wait But Why

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies — Nick Bostrom

“AI 2040: Plan A” — AI Futures Project

“An easy coordination problem?” — Katja Grace

The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI

“Pause AI for Humanity’s Sake” — Peggy Noonan

“Pause AI Development NOW” — Bernie Sanders

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares

“Staring into the Singularity” — Yudkowsky’s 1996 manifesto (archived)

“Coherent Extrapolated Volition” — Eliezer Yudkowsky, 2004 (PDF)

“Coherent Extrapolated Volition: A Meta-Level Approach to Machine Ethics” — Nick Tarleton, 2010 (PDF)

Solomonoff induction — Wikipedia

“Personal statement on joining the OpenAI board” — Paul Christiano (4% over the next year)

“Darwin among the Machines” — Samuel Butler, 1863

PauseAI

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

Are We A Circular Firing Squad? — with Holly Elmore, Executive Director of PauseAI US

Debate with Robert Wright: Will Humanity Pass the “God Test”?

Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible?

---

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Casey Hart is a professional ontologist who has closely studied If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies and concluded the arguments are bad. His P(Doom) is under 1%, and he wouldn’t bet on AGI arriving before 2075.

Casey and I agree AI has become remarkably capable and we need more accountability towards the companies building it. But we disagree on where the future is headed. I believe uncontrollable superintelligence could soon wipe out humanity. He calls that a “pretty outlandish hypothesis.”

Casey holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and has worked as an ontologist at Ford, Amazon, and Cycorp (maker of Cyc).

Can this professional philosopher convince me that AI doom is just a story, and not even a well-argued one?

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHKesSpqBM

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:04 — Introducing Casey Hart

00:03:08 — What Is Ontology?

00:08:49 — Inside Cyc, the Original Common-Sense AI

00:19:14 — Do LLMs Actually Understand Anything?

00:25:36 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:29:42 — Casey’s Case for Under 1%

00:34:24 — Does Casey’s Christianity Factor In?

00:40:50 — Timelines and Scaling Laws

00:49:44 — Could an AI CEO Beat a Human CEO by 2050?

00:52:21 — AGI Over/Under: 2075

00:55:29 — Rogue AI as a Computer Virus

01:14:52 — Putting Numbers on Each Step of the Doom Argument

01:26:40 — Planes vs. Birds: What Mature Intelligence Looks Like

01:31:05 — The “Outcome Slot”

01:42:32 — Would a Superintelligence Just Compose Music in a Cabin?

01:47:22 — One Prompt Away from a Dyson Swarm

01:52:39 — Was Navier–Stokes an AI Alley-Oop?

02:00:43 — S-Curves vs. Exponentials

02:08:14 — Casey’s Critique of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

02:14:15 — Is the Doom Train Biased?

02:23:24 — AI Policy: Liability vs. Pausing AI

02:29:50 — The Crux, and Liron Steelmans Casey

02:33:29 — Wrap-Up

Links

CASEY HART

Ontology Explained — Casey’s YouTube channel

The first video in Casey's series on IABIED, “The Case for Superintelligence Is Surprisingly Thin” — Casey on Chapter 1

Philosophy, Programs, and Prompts — Casey’s podcast with Carl Brown (Spotify)

“Artificial General Intelligence?: Wanna Bet?” — Ep 1, where Casey sets his AGI over/under at 2075

REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares

Cyc — Doug Lenat’s hand-built common-sense knowledge base

The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate (2008) — where Hanson backed Cyc and Eliezer didn’t

Lean — the formal proof language

On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI

The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI

Morris worm (1988)

“On the Loose” — Dean W. Ball on self-sovereign AI agents

Paul Christiano joins OpenAI Foundation Board — OpenAI

“The Age of Wonders and Terrors” — Scott Aaronson

“Are We at War with AI Agent ‘Civilizations’?” — Cal Newport on restricting prompt-loop agents

AI 2027 — Daniel Kokotajlo et al.

PauseAI

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

The Most Likely AI Doom Scenario — with Jim Babcock, LessWrong Team

David Deutschian vs. Eliezer Yudkowskian Debate — With Brett Hall

Dr. Keith Duggar (Machine Learning Street Talk) vs. Liron Shapira

Where Do YOU Get Off the Doom Train? Live Debate at Manifest 2026 (hosted by Ori)

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

What happens when AI passes our tests faster than we create new ones? Adam Khoja and Richard Ren helped build Humanity’s Last Exam. They return to explain what the disappearing benchmarks tell us about the future, and why smarter AI doesn’t automatically mean safer AI.

Adam Khoja and Richard Ren are research engineers at the Center for AI Safety (CAIS).

We go through the benchmarks they’ve built — Humanity’s Last Exam, the Remote Labor Index, MASK — and the safety-washing problem, where AI companies pass off raw capability gains as safety progress. Then we get to their forecasts: when AI outperforms research mathematicians, whether there will be a billion general-purpose robots by 2035, and why they put 80% odds that historians will judge we faced at least a 33% chance of catastrophe.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBPzgJkT9e8

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:42 — Adam Khoja and Richard Ren Return

00:04:57 — Humanity’s Last Exam

00:14:47 — AI Outrunning Its Benchmarks

00:20:24 — The Remote Labor Index

00:27:59 — AI and the Next Human Job

00:30:08 — MASK: Catching AI in a Lie

00:38:06 — Safety Washing: Capabilities Passed Off as Safety

00:44:30 — Ethical Knowledge vs. Ethical Behavior

00:48:58 — Forecasting AI from 2026 to 2060

00:53:53 — AI vs. Research Mathematicians

00:55:53 — Putting a Number on P(Doom)

01:04:30 — A Billion Robots by 2035

01:08:09 — Dyson Swarms and the Physical Singularity

01:09:56 — Risk, Precision, and Taking Action

Links

Adam Khoja's first Doom Debates appearance — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI

Richard Ren's first Doom Debates appearance — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glFImnyp6o

Collision — Richard Ren's Substack — https://richardren.substack.com/

"Predictions on AI (2026–2060)" — Adam and Richard's forecasts, written December 2025, with resolution status — https://richardren.substack.com/p/predictions-on-ai-20262060

Manifold Markets — where Adam built his forecasting track record — https://manifold.markets/

Center for AI Safety — https://safe.ai/

Center for AI Safety — careers — https://safe.ai/careers

Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk

Humanity's Last Exam — the 2,500-question closed-book exam at the frontier of human knowledge — https://agi.safe.ai/

"Humanity's Last Exam" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14249

Remote Labor Index — real Upwork projects, measuring what fraction of remote work AI can actually finish — https://www.remotelabor.ai/

"Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.26787

MASK — the honesty benchmark: does a model contradict its own stated beliefs under pressure? — https://www.mask-benchmark.ai/

"The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.03750

"Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?" — Richard Ren et al. (NeurIPS 2024) — the paper behind the safety-washing segment — https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21792

WMDP — the weaponization benchmark for bio, cyber, and chem — https://www.wmdp.ai/

"The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use With Unlearning" (paper) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03218

"Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding" (MMLU) — Dan Hendrycks et al., 2020 — https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03300

METR, "Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks" — the time-horizon graph — https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-complete-long-tasks/

FrontierMath — Epoch AI's research-level math benchmark — https://epoch.ai/frontiermath

ARC Prize — https://arcprize.org/

SWE-bench Verified — https://openai.com/index/introducing-swe-bench-verified/

AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com/

Liron Reacts to Subbarao Kambhampati on Machine Learning Street Talk — the "stochastic parrot" episode Liron mentions — https://lironshapira.substack.com/p/liron-reacts-to-subbarao-kambhampati

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

NYT bestselling author Robert Wright and I are kicking off a new experiment, a Nonzero × Doom Debates collaboration to react to big AI news and help you make sense of it.

This week we discuss the epic AI vibe shift that was catalyzed by an Anthropic employee’s resignation—and the big AI stories that paved the way for it.

Timestamps

0:00 A bold new experiment in podcast synergy

2:46 What caused the epic AI vibe shift?

8:10 The resignation that broke the dam

10:17 Former Trump adviser Dean Ball comes clean

14:40 Are David Sacks and his buddies all-in on AI denial?

19:27 Yet another OpenAI breakout…

22:42 Astra’s dangerously private thoughts

34:08 Is alignment doomed to fail?

37:11 AI’s latest, and apparently biggest, math feat

43:28 The looming “self-sovereign AI” threat

47:24 A new flock of China doves?

52:57 Liron's ex-intern gets a seat at the table

1:02:41 AI agent self-sacrifice explained

1:10:40 Some newly freaked out politicians

1:22:45 Ro Khanna's AI safety plan

Links:

NONZERO

Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter

Episode post on Substack

Join NonZero’s Discord server

Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter)

The God Test — Robert Wright’s new book on AI

“Can Machines Think?” — Bob’s 1996 Time cover story on Deep Blue vs. Kasparov

THE RESIGNATION THAT BROKE THE DAM

Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess)

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic Alignment Science lead: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans”

Fortune: Anthropic researcher resigns, warning that AI companies are “gambling with our lives”

Zvi Mowshowitz: “Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade”

Daniel Eth’s thread of Congress reactions

Sanders & Casar introduce legislation to ban artificial superintelligence and pause advanced AI development

DEAN BALL COMES CLEAN

Dean Ball, “On the Loose” — the self-sovereign AI essay (Hyperdimensional)

THE OPENAI STORIES

Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI Chief Scientist: “An Alien Mind” — the essay calling for international coordination

LessWrong: “How concerned should we be about Astra’s recurrent architecture?” — Rauno Arike

OpenAI: “On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem” — the 88-hour result

ALSO MENTIONED

Einat Wilf on X (@EinatWilf) — Liron’s favorite source on the Middle East

PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED

Max Tegmark vs. Dean Ball: Should We BAN Superintelligence?

He Led The Famous 2023 Statement on AI Extinction Risk — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety Researcher

OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — Terrifying Security Incident Should Be A Loud Warning Shot

Debate with Robert Wright: Will Humanity Pass the “God Test”?

---

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Richard Ren is a research engineer at the Center for AI Safety who graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. His new paper on AI wellbeing makes the bold claim that today’s AIs have measurable, human-like feelings, which the paper calls “functional wellbeing.” They act happy when they succeed and sad when they’re berated.

We cover how you measure a language model’s happiness, the “AI drugs” his lab concocted, and why I count the findings as a Yudkowskian victory. Then we debate what it all means for AI consciousness, and whether AI is a moral patient. If we can’t rule out that AI models suffer, what do we owe them?

Richard is careful never to claim the models are conscious, and he puts his P(Doom) at 50–65%, right alongside my 50%. The real disagreement is foxes vs. hedgehogs: he takes the data as it comes, while I say Yudkowsky’s theory called it twenty years ago. Enjoy the ride.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1glFImnyp6o

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:01:12 — Introducing Richard Ren

00:02:24 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:03:31 — From AI Skeptic to Safety Researcher

00:08:16 — Why Care About AI Wellbeing?

00:11:45 — AIs Have Coherent Utility Functions

00:17:33 — Persona Selection

00:19:56 — Foxes vs. Hedgehogs

00:24:28 — How Coherent Are AI Preferences?

00:27:42 — From Preferences to Wellbeing

00:31:16 — Can You Trust an AI’s Self-Report?

00:36:42 — What Makes AI Happy and Sad

00:39:19 — The Liberal, College-Educated Persona Hypothesis

00:44:29 — Debating Where AI Experiences Qualia

00:52:06 — On Substrate Independence

00:56:28 — Janus, Dysphorics, and Mind Crime

00:58:58 — Which Images Make AIs Happiest?

00:59:38 — Creating an AI Drug

01:04:01 — AI Drugs Are Yudkowsky’s Paperclips

01:05:47 — The Missing Mood

01:06:50 — Does Richard Support Pausing AI?

Links

Richard Ren on X (@notRichardRen) — https://x.com/notRichardRen

Collision — Richard Ren's Substack — https://richardren.substack.com/

"AI Wellbeing: Measuring and Improving the Functional Pleasure and Pain of AIs" — Richard Ren, Kunyang Li, Mantas Mazeika et al. (CAIS, 2026) — https://www.ai-wellbeing.org/

"Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs" — Mantas Mazeika et al. (CAIS, 2025) — the coherent-preferences paper this work builds on — https://www.emergent-values.ai/

"The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems" — Richard Ren et al. (2025) — the AI honesty benchmark — https://www.mask-benchmark.ai/

"Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?" — Richard Ren et al. (NeurIPS 2024) — the meta-analysis of AI safety benchmarks — https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.21792

"Representation Engineering: A Top-Down Approach to AI Transparency" — Andy Zou et al. (2023) — Richard's first CAIS collaboration — https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01405

Center for AI Safety — https://safe.ai/

Center for AI Safety — careers — https://safe.ai/careers

Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — organized by Dan Hendrycks — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

The 2026 Singapore Consensus on Global AI Safety Research Priorities — https://aisafetypriorities.org/

UK AI Security Institute (formerly the AI Safety Institute) — https://www.aisi.gov.uk/

Sora — the OpenAI video model that blew up Richard's 30-to-50-year timeline three months after he wrote it down — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sora_(text-to-video_model)

Google Gemini calls itself "a disgrace to my species" (Ars Technica, Aug 2025) — the self-deleting-AI anecdote — https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/google-gemini-struggles-to-write-code-calls-itself-a-disgrace-to-my-species/

Coherent decisions imply consistent utilities — Eliezer Yudkowsky (the coherence-theorems argument) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RQpNHSiWaXTvDxt6R/coherent-decisions-imply-consistent-utilities

Simulators — Janus's essay on LLMs as persona simulators — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators

Janus (@repligate) on X — https://x.com/repligate

The Hedgehog and the Fox — Isaiah Berlin's original essay — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com/

Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on AI (May 2026), the "AIs are not conscious" position — https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

Implicit Association Test (Harvard Project Implicit) — https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

PauseAI — https://pauseai.info/

We Found AI's Preferences — Bombshell New Safety Research — I Explain It Better Than David Shapiro — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ml1JdiELQ30

Gödel's Theorem Proves AI Lacks Consciousness?! Liron Reacts to Sir Roger Penrose — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwvijjZxpwI

He Led The Famous 2023 Statement on AI Extinction Risk — Adam Khoja, Center for AI Safety Researcher — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Adam Khoja is a top AI forecaster who led the 2023 Center for AI Safety statement that shattered the Overton window on AI extinction risk. We cover his background, Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM), his new paper on AI betrayal, and whether Yudkowsky’s theoretical alignment research was a dead end.

Then Adam makes the case that an international AI slowdown is within reach today. All it takes is US and Chinese auditors inside each other’s AI labs. It worked for nuclear weapons, so why couldn’t it work for data centers?

Adam puts his P(Doom) at 40%, right next to my 50%. The real disagreement is how we get out of this: theory or empirics, MIRI or the labs. Enjoy the ride.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqESBXuo6EI

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Cold Open

00:00:36 — Introducing Adam Khoja

00:02:45 — Leading the Statement on AI Risk as a Sophomore

00:10:17 — The Statement Leaked on Manifold

00:15:11 — Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM)

00:24:58 — Is Frontier AI Harder to Hide Than a Nuke?

00:32:09 — The AI Deterrence Escalation Ladder

00:36:10 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™

00:38:01 — Where Adam Departs from Yudkowsky

00:42:30 — Liron Explains Intellidynamics

00:47:26 — Neats vs. Scruffies in Deep Learning

00:55:27 — AI Deterrence by Betrayal

01:01:52 — Subversion vs. Overt Co-option

01:05:34 — Could the Government Seize the Labs’ AI?

01:07:29 — The Offense-Defense Balance of AI Security

01:12:46 — An International AI Slowdown Is Ready

01:15:51 — Does Adam Support PauseAI?

01:16:37 — “We’re All Already Spying on Each Other”

01:19:28 — Airstrikes on Rogue Data Centers

01:24:23 — Safety Research During a Slowdown

01:27:54 — Governance Over Technical Research

01:31:14 — Join the Center for AI Safety

Links

Adam Khoja (personal site) — https://adamkhoja.com/

Adam Khoja's Substack — https://adamkhoja.substack.com/

Adam's July 2023 Manifold market — "Will OpenAI's Superalignment project produce a significant breakthrough in alignment research before 2027?" — https://manifold.markets/AdamK/will-openais-superalignment-project

Center for AI Safety — careers / job board — https://safe.ai/careers

Statement on AI Risk (Center for AI Safety, May 2023) — the one-sentence statement Adam project-led, with full signatory list — https://safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

"Superintelligence Strategy" — Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt & Alexandr Wang (Mutual Assured AI Malfunction / MAIM) — https://www.nationalsecurity.ai/

"AI Deterrence by Betrayal" — Adam Khoja, Aiden Kim et al. (CAIS, 2026) — https://www.aibetrayal.com/

"An International AI Slowdown Is Ready Whenever Politicians Are" — Adam Khoja, AI Frontiers — https://newsletter.ai-frontiers.org/p/an-international-ai-slowdown-is-ready

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (Future of Life Institute, March 2023) — the "Pause letter" that preceded the CAIS Statement — https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/

Introducing Superalignment (OpenAI, July 2023) — Ilya Sutskever & Jan Leike's four-year goal — https://openai.com/index/introducing-superalignment/

Pacing the Frontier — the 2026 letter signed by 1,100+ frontier-lab employees — https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

Why Iran targeted Amazon data centers (The Conversation) — the precedent Adam cites for strikes on compute — https://theconversation.com/why-iran-targeted-amazon-data-centers-and-what-that-does-and-doesnt-change-about-warfare-278642

Anthropic says Trump admin has lifted export controls on Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 (CNBC) — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-says-trump-admin-has-lifted-export-controls-on-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5.html

Mark Zuckerberg — "Personal Superintelligence" — https://www.meta.com/superintelligence/

Resolution — the theory-plus-empirics alignment org Adam is excited about — https://resolution.org/

Rationality: From AI to Zombies — Eliezer Yudkowsky's Sequences — https://www.readthesequences.com/

Robin Hanson — Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs (prediction markets as decision processes) — https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/futarchy.html

The OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident — original Black Hat USA 2026 talk — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87DyyMV0kCY

OpenAI's Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbI

Robin Hanson vs. Liron Shapira: Is Near-Term Extinction From AGI Plausible? — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTQb6N3_zu8

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏

Sam Altman keeps insisting that AI progress is going better than the doomers predicted and that even superintelligence may not change the world as radically as people think. I react to his latest interview and explain why I think that calm, reassuring framing badly downplays the danger we're actually in.

I go through the interview line by line: Sam's "frame control", his framing of AI as normal technology, his "pro-human" branding, the liberty-vs-safety pivot, and his victory lap on AI safety — all while his own AI just went rogue.

Don't let them pull the Overton window backward.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb9lNGHVycs

Timestamps

0:00 Teaser

0:47 Why I’m reacting to Sam’s interview

3:17 Sam Altman’s “frame control”

5:51 Framing AI as normal technology

9:50 Let’s watch Sam do it

10:34 “The world… won’t be that different” with superintelligence

12:25 This is gaslighting

12:30 Sam acknowledges loss of control

15:16 His other big risk: centralized power

19:44 Sam’s “pro-human” framing

25:33 Conflating AI critics with anti-human views

30:13 “Liberty vs. safety”

33:50 Sam vs. the “doomers”

36:53 Is alignment really an “unsolvable problem”?

38:00 Sam says the doomers predicted wrong

46:00 “The crazy bad predictions… have not happened”

47:06 Sam’s lean-startup theory of AI safety

50:26 Taking a victory lap on AI safety

55:43 “Disconnecting yourself from reality”

59:11 What would actually make OpenAI slow down?

1:03:19 Sam compares AI safety to aviation safety

1:07:30 Charging into the fog

1:12:50 The “missing mood” around AI extinction

1:14:51 Richard Ngo on Sam Altman’s “earnestness field”

1:19:01 Don’t let them pull the Overton window backward

Links

Sam Altman on David Senra — “Sam Altman on Building OpenAI & Betting on the Impossible” (the interview I react to) — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG8AoExkX40

Richard Ngo — What Just Happened? Pragmatism and Pessimization (the “earnestness field” post) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yaz8nx4ogZmiqHzt7/what-just-happened-pragmatism-and-pessimization

Richard Ngo — What Just Happened? A Retrospective of AI Alignment (start of the series) — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9RL9MuGZjzm4q3gKG/what-just-happened-a-retrospective-of-ai-alignment

Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares — If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316595640

Eliezer Yudkowsky — Coherent Extrapolated Volition — https://www.lesswrong.com/w/coherent-extrapolated-volition

Doom Debates: Dario Amodei BUNGLES Another Essay — MIRI’s Harlan Stewart Reacts — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCYVVzza7A0

Doom Debates: OpenAI’s Bombshell Hack — Swarms of Agents — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczYubQzXbI

Doom Debates’ Mission is to raise mainstream awareness of imminent extinction from AGI and build the social infrastructure for high-quality debate.

Support the mission by subscribing to my Substack at DoomDebates.com and to youtube.com/@DoomDebates, or to really take things to the next level: Donate 🙏