Written very quickly for the Inkhaven Residency.

As I take the time to reflect on the state of AI Safety in early 2026, one question feels unavoidable: have we, as the AI Safety community, already lost? That is, have we passed the point of no return, after which AI doom becomes both likely and effectively outside of our control?

Spoilers: as you might guess from Betteridge's Law, my answer to the headline question is no. But the salience of this question feels quite noteworthy to me nonetheless, and reflects a more negative outlook on the future.

Yesterday I laid out “the plan” as I understood it in 2024.

Today, I’ll explain the reasons I’ve become more pessimistic on the 2024 plan. (And tomorrow, I’ll talk about why I think the answer is still no.)

Reasons for more doom

(Unilateral) voluntary commitments from companies seem unlikely to hold

In our original RSP blog post, we outlined a vision for RSPs as companies “committing to gate scaling on concrete evaluations and empirical observations”, where “we should expect to halt AI development in cases where we do see dangerous capabilities, and continue it in cases where worries about dangerous capabilities [...]

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Outline:

(01:02) Reasons for more doom

(01:06) (Unilateral) voluntary commitments from companies seem unlikely to hold

(02:21) AI progress seems to be consistent with faster timelines

(03:26) Ambitious technical research has (largely) not paid out

(04:02) The community has largely concentrated its investment into Anthropic

(05:10) The current US administration has many bad qualities from an AI Safety standpoint, and explicitly opposes AI Safety

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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