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Safety, Ethics & Governance · advanced · concept 295 of 311 · Updated Nov 4, 2026

Existential Risk from AI

Existential risk from AI is the chance that advanced AI wipes out humanity or permanently and drastically curtails its potential (Bostrom). In May 2023 a statement signed by Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei called extinction risk from AI a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Hendrycks and colleagues group catastrophic risks into malicious use, AI races, organizational accidents and rogue AI.

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Key terms

x-riskCatastrophic riskRogue AIPower-seeking AILoss of controlAI race

Where you meet it in the real world

Frontier lab safety policies, government AI safety institutes, the International AI Safety Report, research funding priorities