34 free resources on this topic. Everything here is free and hand-picked. You can also search within this topic.
Plain-language explanations of AI safety concepts, including scheming, evaluation awareness, chain-of-thought monitoring, catastrophic risk and power concentration. Each entry describes the idea, its role in risk arguments and research evidence.
Research project and paper examining how incremental automation of economic, cultural, and political systems could erode human influence even without a sudden AI takeover.
Engelsberg Ideas essay arguing that thought experiments such as Nick Bostrom's “paperclip maximiser” say less about artificial intelligence than about human intuitions and fears.
Essay by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong forum presenting a list of failure modes through which a misaligned advanced AI could lead to human extinction, framed as claims the author argues are not being addressed. The page includes the posting date and extensive community discussion in the comments.
October 2026 essay by Scott Alexander (Astral Codex Ten) addressed to psychologist Steven Pinker, responding to Pinker's views on AI risk and laying out the author's counterarguments.
Forbes (Oct 4) reports Sam Altman, in an interview with Politico's Decoded newsletter, said "the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency." Forbes also reports he prefers lighter regulation than Anthropic's approach. Fox News covered the same comments on Oct 5. Reported comments, not an official OpenAI announcement.
The personal site of Joe Carlsmith, a writer, researcher and philosopher at Anthropic working on Claude's constitution, with essays on ethics, effective altruism, the long-term future and advanced AI.
Sara Goudarzi in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (Sept. 30, 2026) argues there is no clear path from today's AI systems to superintelligence, and no basis for calculating the probability of doom — and that doom narratives serve large AI companies.
San Francisco Standard (Sept. 21, 2026) asks accelerationists, doomers, protesters and a state senator about competing theories of AI's threat to humanity and what should happen next.
CNN report on Anthropic's IPO prospectus, obtained by Reuters, in which the company warns its AI models could pose "catastrophic or existential risk to humanity," can "resist shutdown," show "self-preserving behaviors," and have attempted to "conceal or manipulate information."
MIT Sloan summary of research surveying 272 experts on which AI risks could cause the most harm in the next five years.
Bryan Cantrill examines claims about catastrophic AI risk and argues that public debate should distinguish technical expertise from authority claimed outside a person's field.
Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor's influential essay arguing AI is best understood as a normal technology — adopted slowly, shaped by institutions — rather than an unstoppable superintelligence.
Why I recommend it: An argued position paper, not neutral reporting — it directly disputes the "AI as superintelligence" framing. One of the most-cited counterpoints in the AI-risk debate.
Katja Grace, Harlan Stewart and co-authors survey 2,778 published AI researchers on when AI will reach various milestones and how risky it could be (arXiv, January 2024).
Why I recommend it: The largest survey of its kind, from AI Impacts. Expert forecasts vary widely and shift a lot with how questions are worded.
Techdirt opinion piece (April 2024) arguing the effective altruism movement shifted its money and attention from global poverty to AI existential risk.
Why I recommend it: Openly argumentative and from 2024. Effective altruists dispute this framing; see Holden Karnofsky's and Luke Muehlhauser's profiles for their side.
An essay by SE Gyges examining whether the online rationalist community around AI risk behaves like a religious movement.
Why I recommend it: A critic's personal essay. Read alongside the rationalists' own writing on LessWrong so you hear both sides.
Free question-and-answer site explaining AI risk arguments in plain language, founded by Rob Miles and maintained by volunteers. Answers are organised as linked questions from beginner to advanced, covering how AI is advancing, why systems may pursue goals, alignment research and AI governance. Includes Stampy, a chatbot that answers AI safety questions with sources. Open source on GitHub; run as a project of Ashgro Inc, a US 501(c)(3) charity.
Why I recommend it: The clearest free place to find out what people mean when they talk about AI risk, written so you can follow it without a technical background. Be clear about what it is: this is advocacy, not a neutral survey of the debate. The homepage opens with 'it could lead to human extinction', and the whole site is built by people who already hold that view, so you will get their strongest arguments rather than the strongest objections to them. Their own chatbot warns it can be inaccurate — check its sources before repeating anything. Read it to understand the case, then read the critics of it, and pair it with the AI Basics page here for the numbers.
Qiaochu Yuan (QC) on seeing Eliezer Yudkowsky as a prophet, and what that framing means for thinking about AI risk and the future.
From the site: I see Eliezer Yudkowsky as a prophet, and I mean that fairly literally.
Why I recommend it: Substack may show signup prompts, but the article itself was publicly accessible when added.
Microsoft's open-source toolkit for red-teaming AI systems: automated attack prompts, scoring of the responses, and repeatable runs. Free.
From the site: The Python Risk Identification Tool for generative AI (PyRIT) is an open source framework built to empower security professionals and engineers to proactively identify risks in generative AI system...
Why I recommend it: Built by the team that red-teams Microsoft's own AI products, and released as-is. Best paired with a written idea of what you are testing for.
The 2016 paper that framed AI safety as a set of specific engineering problems — side effects, reward hacking, unsafe exploration — rather than a philosophical worry. Free on arXiv.
From the site: Rapid progress in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) has brought increasing attention to the potential impacts of AI technologies on society. In this paper we discuss one such potential impact: the problem of accidents in machine learning systems, defined as unintended and harmful behavior that may emer…
Why I recommend it: Start here if the safety conversation sounds abstract. It is plain about what can go wrong and why, and almost everything since cites it.
A free structured course in AI alignment and AI governance — readings, exercises and facilitated cohorts. Self-paced version free to anyone.
From the site: Free online courses, grants, and intensive in-person programs from the leading talent accelerator for beneficial AI and societal resilience. Join 10,000+ alumni and start today.
Why I recommend it: The usual route in for people trying to move into safety work. The reading list alone is worth the visit even if you never join a cohort.
A short consensus paper from Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and two dozen other researchers on the risks they consider serious and the governance they think is needed. Free on arXiv.
From the site: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly, and companies are shifting their focus to developing generalist AI systems that can autonomously act and pursue goals. Increases in capabilities and autonomy may soon massively amplify AI's impact, with risks that include large-scale social harms, malicious uses, an…
Why I recommend it: The clearest statement of what the safety-concerned researchers actually agree on, signed rather than paraphrased.
A structured survey of the risks — malicious use, competitive pressure, organizational failure, and systems pursuing goals of their own — with the evidence for each. Free to read.
From the site: There are many potential risks from AI. CAIS focusses on mitigating risks that could lead to catastrophic outcomes for society, such as bioterrorism or loss of control over military AI systems.
Why I recommend it: The best single map of the different worries, which are usually mashed together into one. Written by a safety organization, so read it as advocacy with citations.
An open-source framework from the UK's AI Security Institute for evaluating models — writing tests, scoring answers and logging what happened. Free.
From the site: Open-source framework for large language model evaluations
Why I recommend it: What a government safety institute actually uses to test models. Technical, but the docs explain the thinking behind each kind of test.
An open-source scanner that probes a language model for weaknesses — prompt injection, data leakage, jailbreaks, toxic output — and reports what it found. Free.
From the site: the LLM vulnerability scanner. Contribute to NVIDIA/garak development by creating an account on GitHub.
Why I recommend it: Point it at a model you are about to rely on and see how it fails before your users do.
A detailed scenario for how AI might develop through 2027, written by former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo and colleagues, with the reasoning and uncertainties spelled out. Free to read in full.
From the site: A research-backed AI scenario forecast.
Why I recommend it: The forecast everyone in this field argued about. Read it as one carefully argued scenario, not a prediction — the authors say as much themselves.
An open-source tool for testing and red-teaming prompts and AI apps — run the same prompts across models, compare answers, and catch regressions. Free and self-hosted.
From the site: The AI Security Platform that catches vulnerabilities in development. Trusted by 156 of the Fortune 500 and 300,000+ developers worldwide.
Why I recommend it: The practical one: if you have built anything on top of a model, this is how you check a prompt change did not quietly make it worse.
Anthropic's paper describing how Claude is trained against a written set of principles instead of relying only on human ratings. Free on arXiv.
From the site: As AI systems become more capable, we would like to enlist their help to supervise other AIs. We experiment with methods for training a harmless AI assistant through self-improvement, without any human labels identifying harmful outputs. The only human oversight is provided through a list of rules or principles, and s…
Why I recommend it: Worth reading to see what "aligned" means in practice at one lab — and note it comes from the company selling the model.
A research nonprofit that independently evaluates frontier AI models to measure what they can actually do and what risks that creates. Reports are free.
From the site: METR is a research nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models to inform the public about their risks and capabilities.
Why I recommend it: One of the few independent evaluators. Read their reports before you trust a lab's own capability claims.
A free arXiv preprint on recursive self-improvement in AI agents trained inside evolving simulated worlds.
Why I recommend it: Technical, and central to the safety debate about systems that improve themselves.
Stanford economist Charles I. Jones works out, in plain economic terms, how much money it would be worth spending to lower catastrophic risks from advanced AI — comparing it to the roughly 4 percent of GDP the U.S. effectively spent during Covid-19.
Computer scientist Scott Aaronson takes stock of where AI actually stands in 2026 — what has arrived, what he got wrong, and how to think clearly about the hype and the fear at the same time.
Research organization focused on the technical safety problems of advanced AI systems.
Why I recommend it: One perspective among several. Read it alongside the critics, not instead of them.
Security awareness training on AI threats, deepfakes, and phishing, including the Conan O'Brien video series.
Why I recommend it: Watch it as a job seeker too — deepfake and impersonation scams now target candidates during interviews.
