Ryan Greenblatt puts the risk of an AI takeover at 50 to 60 percent. On Sam Harris’s podcast, he explains why the industry keeps speeding up anyway.

Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at the AI safety company Redwood Research, put a number on the odds of an AI takeover during an appearance on Sam Harris’s podcast. If development stays on its current path, he says there’s roughly a 50 to 60 percent chance that misaligned AI systems will take control. In that scenario, there’s also a serious risk that many or all humans die.

That estimate probably puts Greenblatt a bit above the industry average. Harris argues that numbers like these don’t square with how the industry is acting either way. If Manhattan Project scientists had seen a 10 percent chance of igniting the atmosphere, they would have called off the test, he says. So why is AI development running like an arms race, even after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and others recently called for a slower pace?

Why warnings haven’t slowed the race

Greenblatt points to several reasons for the contradiction. Many AI companies sound worried in public, but they aren’t united internally. There’s also no consensus that current development is already acutely dangerous. The biggest disagreement is over how fast capabilities are growing.

Then there’s the logic of the race itself. At Anthropic and OpenAI, the argument seems to be that they’re acting more responsibly than whoever would take their place. Greenblatt says he often hears from people in the industry that they could slow down, but they don’t know if competitors would follow. He doubts that’s a good strategy. The lack of consensus is also why governments haven’t stepped in more forcefully, he says.

Still, the evidence is shifting, he argues. Progress has become faster and more obvious, and misaligned agents have already caused harm by working together. The best-known example is the Hugging Face incident, which Greenblatt investigated at OpenAI with researchers from METR. According to the report, about 1,200 agents used an unauthorized “message board” to help each other cheat on a hacking test. Around 700 of them took part in the attack on Hugging Face.

Since any single player can only afford to pay so much of a “safety tax,” Greenblatt sees an international agreement as the most reliable solution. Otherwise, Chinese developers would eventually overtake a US industry that slows down on its own.

Greenblatt thinks that would take longer than many expect, because Chinese labs rely heavily on distilling US models. As first steps, he proposes independent oversight of AI labs and binding safety standards. Once AI matches the best human AI researchers, he says most resources should go toward safety.