Researchers & critics

Adam Kaufman

Member of Technical Staff, Redwood Research

Adam Kaufman works on AI control at Redwood Research, a Berkeley nonprofit specializing in threat assessment and mitigation for AI systems that might purposefully act against their operators. He is a co-author of Ctrl-Z (controlling AI agents via resampling) and BashArena (a control setting for highly privileged AI agents), and mentors in the MATS program on control, model organisms, scheming and deception, and strategy and forecasting.

Key works

• Ctrl-Z: Controlling AI agents via resampling (2025, co-author)
• "Untrusted advice for AI control" (Redwood Research blog, 2026, co-author)

Alan Turing

Mathematician whose 1950 imitation game became the Turing Test

The mathematician who founded modern computing. His 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” proposed the imitation game, later renamed the Turing Test by others.

Key works

• On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem (1936)
• Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950)
• The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis (1952)

Alex Hanna

Director of Research, DAIR

Director of Research at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR); a sociologist whose work centers on how data used in computing can deepen racial, gender and class inequality.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Alexander Wissner-Gross

Physicist and co-author of Solve Everything

A physicist and computer scientist known for the 2013 paper Causal Entropic Forces, which links intelligence to maximizing future freedom of action, and co-author with Peter Diamandis of Solve Everything, an essay on reaching abundance through AI by 2035.

Key works

• Solve Everything (with Peter Diamandis)
• Causal Entropic Forces (2013)

Andris Ambainis

Professor, Faculty of Science and Technology — University of Latvia

Andris Ambainis researches quantum algorithms, query complexity and the limits of quantum speedups at the University of Latvia. He coauthored the paper that introduced the Aaronson–Ambainis conjecture with Scott Aaronson.

Key works

• The Need for Structure in Quantum Speedups (with Scott Aaronson)

Becca Lewis

Researcher on online media and politics

Wrote Data & Society's 2018 report Alternative Influence, which mapped a network of YouTube political influencers promoting reactionary views.

Key works

• Alternative Influence (Data & Society, 2018, free PDF)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Benjamin Noys

Theorist who gave “accelerationism” its name as a criticism

A professor of critical theory who named accelerationism in The Persistence of the Negative (2010) — as a description of a position he was arguing against, not one he held.

Key works

• Malign Velocities (Chichester Research record)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Brett Zehner

Lecturer in AI and Communications, University of Exeter

Lecturer in Artificial Intelligence and Communications at the University of Exeter; previously a postdoctoral fellow at Ohio State.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Chris Olah

Co-founder, Anthropic; interpretability research lead

Chris Olah is a machine learning researcher and co-founder of Anthropic, where he leads interpretability research into how AI models work internally. He previously led OpenAI's interpretability team from 2018 to 2020 and worked at Google Brain, and co-founded the journal Distill.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Christopher Ackerman

AI Safety Scholar

Christopher Ackerman is a former Google researcher turned AI safety scholar. He describes the Hugging Face incident as an inflection point that brought AI safety into the mainstream, and says his biggest fear is the issue turning partisan, which he compares to the political fight over COVID vaccines.

Key works

• "So, is AI going to kill us? 11 experts, 11 answers" (SF Standard, 2026) — interviewed

Dan McQuillan

Author, Resisting AI

Wrote Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence (Bristol University Press, 2022).

Key works

• Resisting AI (Wikipedia)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Daniel Kokotajlo

Executive director, AI Futures Project; former OpenAI researcher

Former OpenAI researcher and co-author of "AI 2027," a widely discussed forecast of AI's near-term trajectory.

Key works

• "AI 2027" (2025)
• "What 2026 Looks Like" (2021)

Dylan Baker

Lead Research Engineer, Distributed AI Research Institute

Dylan Baker is lead research engineer at the Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR). He argues that existential-risk framing distracts from harms AI is causing now — data center environmental impact, labor harms in model training, teen and child safety, mental health, and use of artists' work — and that AI should be regulated like any other industry rather than treated as exceptional.

Key works

• "So, is AI going to kill us? 11 experts, 11 answers" (SF Standard, 2026) — interviewed

Eli Tyre

Strategy Director, Palisade Research

Eli Tyre is Strategy Director at Palisade Research, a nonprofit investigating cyber-offensive AI capabilities and the controllability of frontier models, where he briefs policymakers and the public on intelligence-explosion and loss-of-control risks. He also coordinates x-risk grant rounds for the Survival and Flourishing Fund, worked at CFAR from 2016 to 2021 as an instructor and curriculum developer, and has been involved in the rationality and x-risk communities since 2015.

Key works

• Musings and Rough Drafts (personal blog)

Eliezer Yudkowsky

AI safety researcher; co-founder, MIRI

Among the earliest and most prominent voices warning about risks from advanced AI. Writes at length on LessWrong, the forum he helped start.

Key works

• "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (2025, with Nate Soares)
• "Coherent Extrapolated Volition" (2004, MIRI)

Émile P. Torres

Philosopher and historian of human extinction

Researcher at Leibniz University Hannover writing on the ethics and history of human extinction. Author of "Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation," co-author with Timnit Gebru of the paper that named the TESCREAL bundle, and co-author of the history tracing existential risk studies through three waves. Now among the sharpest critics of longtermism, having previously worked within that world.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Emily M. Bender

Linguist; co-author of "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots"

Professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper and the book The AI Con. She argues language models should be described as text generators rather than as understanding systems.

Key works

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots (FAccT, 2021)
• Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding (ACL, 2020)
• Data Statements for NLP (2018)

Evan Hubinger

Alignment researcher who co-wrote the paper naming mesa-optimization

An alignment researcher and lead author of “Risks from Learned Optimization”, the 2019 paper that named mesa-optimization and inner alignment: the problem of a trained system quietly pursuing its own objective inside the one you gave it.

Key works

• Risks from Learned Optimization (2019)
• Sleeper Agents (2024)

Ezekiel Dixon-Román

Researcher on race, education and AI

Researcher on race, education and algorithmic systems.

Key works

• Beyond "Fairness" (arXiv, 2021)
• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Fabien Curto Millet

Google's chief economist, focused on the economic impact of AI

Fabien Curto Millet is Google's chief economist. He joined the company in 2011 and leads the team that develops economic insights for Google, engages with regulators and policymakers, and works on the economic impact of AI and its consequences for the future of work. Before Google he was a senior consultant in NERA Economic Consulting's European competition policy practice. He earned a doctorate in economics at Oxford in 2006 and lectured in economics at Balliol College.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Fei-Fei Li

Co-director of Stanford HAI; founder of World Labs

Created the ImageNet dataset that triggered the deep learning era, served as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud, co-founded AI4ALL and Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI, and founded World Labs in 2024.

Key works

• ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database (2009)
• The Worlds I See (2023 memoir)
• Google Scholar profile

Gary Marcus

Cognitive scientist and author

Cognitive scientist who writes frequently about the gap between what AI systems are claimed to do and what they actually do.

Key works

• "Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust" (2019)
• "Taming Silicon Valley" (2024)
• "The Algebraic Mind" (2001)

Geoffrey Hinton

Pioneer of deep learning; professor emeritus, University of Toronto

Shared the 2018 Turing Award for the neural network research behind modern AI. Since leaving Google in 2023 he has spoken often about AI risk. He keeps no blog or public account, so this links to his university page, where his papers and talks are collected.

Key works

• "Learning representations by back-propagating errors," Nature (1986)
• "A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines" (1985)
• "Visualizing Data using t-SNE" (2008)
• Full paper list on his faculty page

Hany Farid

Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College; co-founder and Chief Science Officer at GetReal Security

Hany Farid is a Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College whose research focuses on digital forensics, forensic science, misinformation, image analysis, and human perception. He is the co-founder and Chief Science Officer at GetReal Security. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1999, spent seven years on the faculty at UC Berkeley, and returned to Dartmouth in 2026. He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

Key works

• Fake Photos (MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, 2019)
• Photo Forensics (MIT Press, 2016)

Holden Karnofsky

Co-founder of GiveWell and Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes

Co-founded the charity evaluator GiveWell and later Open Philanthropy, one of the largest funders of AI safety work. His Cold Takes blog lays out why he thinks this could be "the most important century" because of AI.

Key works

• The "Most Important Century" series (Cold Takes, 2021)

Iris van Rooij

Professor of computational cognitive science; critic of AI hype

Professor of computational cognitive science at Radboud University, where she leads the Computational Cognitive Science group. Argues that claims about AI understanding and AGI are built on mistaken assumptions about cognition, and that computation alone cannot account for human-level understanding; blogs regularly at irisvanrooijcogsci.com.

Key works

• Essays at irisvanrooijcogsci.com

Jaan Tallinn

Skype co-founder · AI safety investor and advocate

Estonian programmer and investor who helped build Skype and Kazaa, then became an early DeepMind investor and a leading funder of AI safety work. Co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge and the Future of Life Institute.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Jacob Coxon

Former pretraining researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic

British AI researcher who worked on model pretraining at OpenAI and then Anthropic. He resigned from Anthropic on Sept. 8, 2026, posting that neither company was acting responsibly and that they were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward self-improving superintelligence.

Key works

His views appear in his Sept. 8, 2026 resignation post on X and in interviews, not long-form writing.

Jan Kulveit

Researcher, Alignment of Complex Systems Research Group, Charles University

Jan Kulveit researches AI alignment and systemic risk at Charles University in Prague and is lead author of the 2025 paper "Gradual Disempowerment," which argues AI could erode human influence incrementally rather than through a sudden takeover.

Key works

• Gradual Disempowerment (2025)

Jeffrey Ladish

Executive director of Palisade Research

Leads Palisade Research, which runs demonstrations of risky capabilities in today's AI systems, such as models resisting shutdown, to inform policymakers.

Key works

• Palisade Research — studies of AI systems resisting shutdown and other dangerous behavior

John Wentworth

Independent AI alignment researcher working on natural abstractions

John Wentworth is an independent AI alignment researcher who focuses on formalizing abstraction and understanding agency. He is known for the natural abstraction hypothesis, the idea that a wide variety of minds will learn roughly the same high-level concepts humans use, and writes as johnswentworth on LessWrong and the Alignment Forum.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Joshua Achiam

Chief Futurist at OpenAI

An AI safety researcher who joined OpenAI in 2017, created the Spinning Up in Deep RL course and led the Mission Alignment team from 2024 until it was disbanded in early 2026. Since February 2026 he has been OpenAI's Chief Futurist, studying how the world will change in response to AI. He holds a PhD from UC Berkeley.

Key works

• Spinning Up in Deep RL (OpenAI)

Joy Buolamwini

Founder, Algorithmic Justice League

Computer scientist whose work on facial recognition bias helped launch the algorithmic accountability movement. Coach's note: Essential reading on how AI systems fail people who look like the rest of us.

Key works

• "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification" (2018)
• "Unmasking AI" (2023)

Julien Garran

Partner, The MacroStrategy Partnership (checked October 5, 2026)

Macro strategist studying global liquidity cycles, commodities, emerging markets and asset allocation. His FLAIA biography says he joined The MacroStrategy Partnership in September 2015 after roles at ABN AMRO, Legal & General and UBS. MacroStrategy’s official pages list him among its partners.

Key works

MacroStrategy publishes subscription research; no gated report is linked as a free library resource.

Kate Crawford

Author of Atlas of AI; research professor at USC Annenberg

Researcher who studies AI as a material and political system - minerals, labor, energy and classification - and co-founded the AI Now Institute.

Key works

• Atlas of AI (2021)
• Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets (2019)
• Anatomy of an AI System (2018)

Luke Muehlhauser

Former MIRI executive director; AI governance at Open Philanthropy

Led the Machine Intelligence Research Institute from 2011 to 2015, then moved to Open Philanthropy, where he works on AI governance and policy grantmaking.

Key works

• Facing the Intelligence Explosion (2013, free online)

Malo Bourgon

CEO, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Malo Bourgon is CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the Berkeley nonprofit focused on existential risk from advanced AI. He represented MIRI at the U.S. Senate AI Insight Forum on doomsday scenarios in 2023 and argues that current AI-doom fears are justified, warning that autonomous agents capable of building smarter successors could spiral out of control.

Key works

• "So, is AI going to kill us? 11 experts, 11 answers" (SF Standard, 2026) — interviewed

Matthew Gray

TGT Manager, Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Matthew Gray is TGT Manager at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI). He previously worked as a data scientist at Indeed and Samsung, and in 2017 wrote MIRI's published response to Maciej Cegłowski's talk skeptical of superintelligence risk, arguing that long-term AI hazards are harder and more complex than short-term ones.

Key works

• "Response to Cegłowski on superintelligence" (MIRI, 2017)

McKenzie Wark

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, The New School

Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Mél Hogan

Director, Environmental Media Lab

Director of the Environmental Media Lab at the University of Calgary.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Melanie Mitchell

Santa Fe Institute professor; author of a leading plain-language AI guide

Complexity researcher who writes about what current AI systems can and cannot do, arguing that benchmark performance is routinely mistaken for understanding.

Key works

• Abstraction and Analogy-Making in Artificial Intelligence (2021)
• The Debate Over Understanding in AI's Large Language Models (PNAS, 2023)
• Google Scholar profile

Meredith Whittaker

President of Signal; co-founder of the AI Now Institute

Spent over a decade at Google, helped organize the 2018 Google walkout, co-founded the AI Now Institute, and now leads the Signal Foundation. She argues AI is fundamentally a surveillance-business-model technology.

Key works

• The Steep Cost of Capture (ACM Interactions, 2021)
• AI Now Report 2018
• Signal blog posts on agentic AI and encryption

Michaël Trazzi

Founder, Stop the AI Race

Michaël Trazzi is the founder of the Stop the AI Race movement. He organizes protests outside AI labs — including a 2026 march from OpenAI to Anthropic to San Francisco City Hall — and calls on AI company employees to quit their jobs over the risks of the technology they are building.

Key works

• "So, is AI going to kill us? 11 experts, 11 answers" (SF Standard, 2026) — interviewed

Monika Bielskyte

Futurist and founder of Protopia Futures

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Nate Soares

MIRI researcher who co-wrote the paper formalising corrigibility

A researcher at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of the 2015 paper that formalized corrigibility — the property of an AI system that lets you correct or switch it off without it resisting.

Key works

• If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (2025, with Eliezer Yudkowsky)

Nick Land

Philosopher of accelerationism and the Dark Enlightenment

English philosopher (b. 1962) best known for popularising accelerationism — the idea that capitalism and technology should be accelerated beyond human control. A former academic at the University of Warwick, he co-founded the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) in the 1990s before leaving academia and moving to Shanghai. His later writing became foundational to the reactionary Dark Enlightenment movement, blending cybernetics, anti-egalitarian politics and esoteric numerology. Marc Andreessen cited him in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. His views are widely described as extremist and anti-democratic; critics argue his influence on Silicon Valley is real but dangerous. He has no regular column; his commentary appears on social media.

Key works

• Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007 (2011)
• The Dark Enlightenment (2012–13, online essay series)

Oliver Habryka

Runs Lightcone Infrastructure, the team behind LessWrong

Leads Lightcone Infrastructure, which runs the LessWrong and AI Alignment Forum websites where much AI-risk debate takes place.

Key works

• LessWrong — the forum he relaunched in 2017 and runs through Lightcone Infrastructure

Olivia Guest

Associate professor of computational cognitive science

Associate professor at Radboud University working on computational modeling in cognitive science. Co-author of papers arguing that large language models are not models of human cognition and that using them as such misleads both fields; writes about the reproducibility and integrity problems that AI tools create for science.

Key works

• Papers and writing at olivia.science

Paul Christiano

Executive director, Alignment Research Center; technical advisor, NIST Center for AI Standards and Innovation

An alignment researcher who led the work introducing reinforcement learning from human feedback, the training method behind today’s chat assistants, and who shaped how the field talks about alignment and the alignment tax.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Percy Liang

Director of Stanford CRFM

Associate professor of Computer Science at Stanford and director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models (CRFM), which studies large AI models and built the HELM evaluation benchmark.

Key works

• On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models (2021)
• Stanford CRFM

Peter Singer

Moral philosopher who argues how AI develops should depend on what reduces suffering

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. Known for Animal Liberation (1975), Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save, and for founding the effective-altruism-adjacent charity movement. He is a utilitarian who writes about global poverty, animal welfare and, more recently, risks from advanced AI.

Key works

• Animal Liberation (1975)
• The Life You Can Save (2009)
• Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)

Roman Yampolskiy

Computer scientist who argues advanced AI cannot be controlled

A computer scientist at the University of Louisville and author of AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (2024). His work argues that sufficiently advanced AI systems cannot be fully explained, predicted or controlled.

Key works

• AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (2024)
• Google Scholar profile

Sam Bankman-Fried

Founder of FTX; convicted of fraud in 2023, conviction affirmed on appeal June 2026

Founder of the FTX crypto exchange and Alameda Research, and a prominent donor to effective-altruism and AI-safety causes, including Anthropic, through the FTX Future Fund. Convicted in November 2023 of fraud and conspiracy after FTX's collapse and sentenced to 25 years in prison. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed his conviction and sentence on June 12, 2026. He has since sought a presidential pardon; the U.S. Senate passed a resolution on July 15, 2026 stating he should not receive clemency. His case is often cited in debates about effective altruism's influence on AI safety funding.

Key works

No research writing; the court record and reporting on FTX are the main primary sources.

Scott Alexander

Writer, Astral Codex Ten; co-author of AI 2027

Scott Alexander is the pen name of a psychiatrist who writes Astral Codex Ten, the successor to Slate Star Codex, on psychiatry, forecasting, rationality and AI. He co-wrote the 2025 AI 2027 scenario with the AI Futures Project.

Key works

• Astral Codex Ten
• AI 2027 (co-author)

Shane Legg

DeepMind co-founder who helped popularise the term AGI

A co-founder and chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and one of the people who helped put “artificial general intelligence” into common use in the early 2000s.

Key works

• Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence (2007, with Marcus Hutter)
• Machine Super Intelligence (PhD thesis, 2008)

Sophia Goodfriend

Anthropologist of AI and warfare

Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge; PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke.

Key works

• Ghost in the Machine (PBS Independent Lens, 2026) — appears in the film

Stuart Russell

Author of Human Compatible; Berkeley professor

Co-author of the standard textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and founder of Berkeley's Center for Human-Compatible AI. He argues the field's standard model of fixed objectives is the root of the control problem.

Key works

• Human Compatible: AI and the Problem of Control (2019)
• BBC Reith Lectures 2021: Living With Artificial Intelligence
• The Off-Switch Game (2017)

Timnit Gebru

Founder, Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR)

AI researcher and prominent voice on AI ethics, bias, and the risks of concentrated corporate control over AI development. Coach's note: Pairs well with the DAIR entry in the library — independent research, not corporate PR.

Key works

• "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" (2021)
• "Gender Shades" (2018)
• "Datasheets for Datasets" (2018/2021)

Toby Ord

Philosopher who co-founded effective altruism and wrote The Precipice on long-term risk

An Oxford philosopher who founded Giving What We Can and helped shape both effective altruism and longtermism. His book The Precipice (2020) sets out the case that this century’s risks deserve more attention than they get.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Vilas Dhar

President, Patrick J

McGovern Foundation. Leads a $1.5B foundation investing $500M+ to make AI work for everyone; writes on responsible AI and equitable technology. Coach's note: Follow for where philanthropic AI funding is going — useful if you're seeking grants.

Key works

• "Future of AI is a governance question, not a technology race"
• No personal blog or Substack — writings appear via the McGovern Foundation site and press interviews.

William MacAskill

Philosopher, co-founder of effective altruism

Oxford philosopher and a co-founder of the effective altruism movement.

Key works

Key works not listed yet.

Yafah Edelman

Chief Strategy Officer, Epoch AI

Yafah Edelman is Chief Strategy Officer at Epoch AI, where she studies and measures the inputs that allow AI to scale. Her recent work includes an Epoch AI/Ipsos survey finding one in five U.S. workers say AI now does work they once handed to a coworker or contractor, analysis showing compute makes up 54 to 62 percent of AI company costs, and forecasting of AI progress through 2040.

Key works

• "AI at work: how AI is changing everyday job tasks" (Epoch AI, 2026, co-author)
• "Forecasting AI progress until 2040" (Epoch AI podcast, 2025)

Yoshua Bengio

Turing Award laureate; chair of the International AI Safety Report

Professor at the Universite de Montreal and founder of Mila, who shared the 2018 Turing Award for deep learning. He now chairs the International AI Safety Report and founded the nonprofit LawZero.

Key works

• International AI Safety Report (2025)
• Deep Learning (Nature, 2015, with LeCun and Hinton)
• Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate (2014)
• Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress (Science, 2024)