---
id: "2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2023-05-30"
date_precision: day
category: policy-safety
importance: 4
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 2
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-30-cais-statement-ai-risk/

# Leading AI scientists sign the one-sentence statement on AI extinction risk

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.'

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Statement on AI Risk (CAIS)](https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk) (safe.ai, official)
2. [Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter (FLI)](https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/) (futureoflife.org, official)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

## Related

- 2023-11-01: [Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit and the Bletchley Declaration](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-11-01-bletchley-ai-safety-summit/index.md)
- 2023-05-01: [Geoffrey Hinton leaves Google so he can speak freely about AI risks](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-05-01-hinton-leaves-google/index.md)
- 2023-03-22: [Future of Life Institute open letter calls for a 6-month pause on training AI more powerful than GPT-4](https://postcutoff.com/e/2023-03-22-fli-pause-giant-ai-experiments/index.md)
- People: [Demis Hassabis](https://postcutoff.com/person/demis-hassabis/), [Geoffrey Hinton](https://postcutoff.com/person/geoffrey-hinton/), [Sam Altman](https://postcutoff.com/person/sam-altman/), [Yoshua Bengio](https://postcutoff.com/person/yoshua-bengio/)