Doom Index / p(doom) / Paul Christiano
Researcher · rank 9 of 22
Paul Christiano p(doom)
Paul Christiano (Head of AI safety, US AI Safety Institute (2024); founder of ARC) has put the risk of AI causing human extinction or a comparably bad outcome at 46%. That is higher than the 38% median of the experts we track.
Latest stated p(doom)
46%
0%Median 38%100%
Stated Apr 27, 2023
Statement history
- Apr 27, 2023
46%
“Probability that humanity has somehow irreversibly messed up our future within 10 years of building powerful AI: 46%”
His estimate for AI takeover specifically is 22%.
LessWrong — “My views on doom”Verified Oct 21, 2026
Context
“p(doom)” is shorthand for the probability that advanced AI leads to human extinction or a similarly irreversible catastrophe. Speakers rarely share one definition or time horizon, so compare numbers with care.
The Doom Index uses the midpoint of each person's latest stated range (46% here) when computing the expert median.
See the full leaderboardOther experts' p(doom)
Roman Yampolskiy 99.999999%Eliezer Yudkowsky 99.5%Dan Hendrycks >80%Daniel Kokotajlo 70%Zvi Mowshowitz 70%Emad Mostaque 50%Holden Karnofsky 10–90%Jan Leike 10–90%Joep Meindertsma 40%Eli Lifland 35–40%Scott Alexander 33%Emmett Shear 5–50%Dario Amodei 25%Yoshua Bengio 20%Elon Musk 20%Reid Hoffman 2 / 10Lina Khan 15%Vitalik Buterin 12%Geoffrey Hinton ~10%Nate Silver 5–10%Yann LeCun ≈0%
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