Connor Leahy

Current institutional profile describes his focus on superintelligence risk, policy and institutional preparedness.

In The Rob Bensinger Compass section, Leahy endorses short timelines and broadly agrees with Yudkowsky’s alignment difficulty arguments, but is less certain and allows that he could be wrong. The interviewer’s 99% framing in 2022 was not his own figure; his August 2026 estimate is a separate, later statement.

At 29:04–32:23 he expects more capable unaligned systems to take over, with competitive pressure driving adoption. At 57:43–58:23 he gives 50–80% extinction or near-extinction within 50 years if humanity does literally nothing; intervention can change this dramatically. At 1:06–1:10 he advocates lawful collective action and buying time. This conditional historical estimate is not an unconditional current P(doom).

Calls for liability across the AI supply chain and a temporary international compute cap to buy time for longer-term safety and political solutions.

In his opening statement Leahy predicts humanity loses control if superintelligence is built, with extinction likely through competition. His answers describe competing AI populations, inadequate current control methods, and an international prohibition with verification. He opposes simply abandoning useful AI or slowing all Western data centres, while maintaining that unregulated competition underprovides security.

Machine transcript with speaker labels; use only Connor’s answers, not Peter McCormack’s. Around 60:44–61:00 he agrees his P(doom) is above 20% and below 100%. When the host puts Nate Soares at 100, he says surely not, maybe 99, and puts his own P(doom) of things going poorly on the current trajectory very, very high, within rounding error of that. He immediately adds that the future is not decided. Supersedes his 2025 figure of 50–80%, which was conditional on doing literally nothing.