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Marcus Williams
Member of technical staff on OpenAI's Safety Oversight team, who put the odds of human extinction at 70% within three years absent regulation or a slowdown, while calling such a regulation or slowdown very possible — the highest figure on this register.
Roles
- May 2025 – presentMember of technical staff, Safety Oversight team, OpenAITwo pages attest the role independently: the source calls him "a member of technical staff on OpenAI's Safety Oversight team" and says he "joined the company in May 2025", and GNcrypto calls him "a member of OpenAI's Safety Oversight team" and says "Williams joined OpenAI in May 2025". The month is as precise as either page gets.Source →
On the record
10 Sept 2026 · Post · X
70% in the next 3 years if there isn’t regulation/slowdown although i think regulation/slowdown is very possible.
Member of technical staff, Safety Oversight team, OpenAI at the time
His own estimate of the odds of human extinction, and the register's highest. The figure is conditional and the hedge sits inside the sentence, so the sentence is carried whole. Both reporting pages record that he posted the warning first and supplied the percentage only after another user turned it into a wager, offering $10,000 in Microsoft shares against OpenAI stock over five years; one of them makes the point itself, that "the hedge matters as much as the number". The lowercase "i" and the slashes are his. The date is the source's, which prints that he wrote on X on September 10, 2026; the post is not sourced here to X itself. The syndication at Yahoo carries the identical sentence with a straight apostrophe and no terminal full stop, which is how the post reads where it is reproduced rather than re-typeset.
OpenAI safety staffer gives 70% extinction odds in 3 years →