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Extinction riskCivil societyAdviser, Scale AI5 entries on the record

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Dan Hendrycks

Dan Hendrycks is the executive director of the Center for AI Safety and an adviser to xAI and Scale AI, who organised the 2023 Statement on AI Risk and argues superintelligence is a nuclear-level national-security danger requiring deterrence.

Roles

  1. 2022presentCo-founder and Executive Director, Center for AI SafetyCreated MMLU and Humanity's Last Exam; organised the May 2023 Statement on AI Risk.Source
  2. 2023presentSafety adviser, xAISymbolic $1 salary, no equity.Source
  3. Nov 2024presentAdviser, Scale AISymbolic $1 salary.Source

On the record

  1. 2 Jun 2026 · Statement · Center for AI Safety

    Frontier AI is now a national security technology, and the National Security Enterprise needs partners fluent in both worlds.

    Adviser, Scale AI at the time

    Announcing a new president and a Washington DC Frontier Security Institute.

    CAIS Names Former xAI Leader Devin Kim President and Establishes Frontier Security Institute

  2. 22 Sept 2025 · Op-ed · AI Frontiers

    During an intelligence recursion — when AI systems would be given broad license to design their successors and human oversight would be minimal — there is a heightened risk that no state will be able to control what results.

    Adviser, Scale AI at the time

    Co-written with Adam Khoja.

    AI Deterrence Is Our Best Option

  3. 6 Mar 2025 · Op-ed · TIME

    What's at stake isn't merely economic competitiveness but perhaps the most geopolitically precarious technology since the atomic bomb.

    Adviser, Scale AI at the time

    Co-written with Eric Schmidt, summarising the paper Superintelligence Strategy (with Alexandr Wang, 7 March 2025, https://www.nationalsecurity.ai/), which proposes "Mutual Assured AI Malfunction".

    The Nuclear-Level Risk of Superintelligent AI

  4. 31 May 2023 · Op-ed · TIME

    We will select against AIs that are easy to turn off, and we will come to depend on AIs that we are less likely to turn off. … Once we hand over control, we won't get it back.

    Safety adviser, xAI at the time

    The Darwinian Argument for Worrying About AI

  5. 30 May 2023 · Statement · Center for AI Safety

    Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

    Safety adviser, xAI at the time

    Listed as "Executive Director, Center for AI Safety"; his organisation drafted and published the statement.

    Statement on AI Risk