Leading AI scientists sign the one-sentence statement on AI extinction risk
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
Hundreds of AI researchers and executives, including Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Hassabis and Amodei, signed: ‘Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.’
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- Major (4 of 5)
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Published 30 May 2023 by the Center for AI Safety
- Signatories included the CEOs of OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Anthropic
- Followed the Future of Life Institute’s 22 March 2023 letter calling for a 6-month pause on training models more powerful than GPT-4
- Geoffrey Hinton left Google in May 2023 to speak freely about AI risk
What happened
A brief joint statement placed AI extinction risk alongside pandemics and nuclear war as a global priority.
Why it matters
Brought catastrophic AI risk into mainstream policy discourse, paving the way for the Bletchley summit and AI safety institutes.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Statement on AI Risk (CAIS)safe.ai, official
- Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (FLI)futureoflife.org, official
Changes
- Filed