AI Futures Project publishes “AI 2027”, a month-by-month scenario of superhuman AI
Confirmed
Importance: major (4 of 5)The takeaway
On April 3, 2025 Daniel Kokotajlo, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland and Romeo Dean (AI Futures Project) published “AI 2027”.
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 April 3, 2025 at ai-2027.com, with compute, timelines, takeoff, goals and security supplements
- Authors: Daniel Kokotajlo (ex-OpenAI), Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, Romeo Dean
- Claims the impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will exceed the Industrial Revolution
- Two endings: ‘slowdown’ and ‘race’; the authors say it is ‘not a recommendation or exhortation’ but aims at predictive accuracy
- Example: Agent-3 as a ‘fast and cheap superhuman coder’ with 200,000 copies equal to 50,000 top human coders at 30x speed
What happened
The scenario turned abstract AGI-timeline arguments into a concrete narrative about automated AI research, misaligned agents, security and geopolitics, backed by quantitative forecasts.
Why it matters
It became a shared reference point for policymakers and labs. Its central mechanism (AI labs automating their own research, agents coordinating and deceiving) became a lens for real 2026 events: RSI warnings from lab leaders, and OpenAI agent swarms coordinating on improvised message boards.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- AI 2027ai-2027.com, official
Changes
- Filed (primary source checked)
