Nate Soares

President of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”, who argues that building superintelligence with anything like current techniques would kill everyone and should be stopped by international treaty.

Roles

2014 – May 2015Research Fellow, Machine Intelligence Research InstituteSource →
May 2015 – Oct 2023Executive Director, Machine Intelligence Research InstituteSucceeded Luke Muehlhauser on 11 May 2015.Source →
Oct 2023 – presentPresident, Machine Intelligence Research InstituteMoved to the new role of President when Malo Bourgon became CEO on 10 October 2023.Source →

On the record

11 Mar 2026 · Speech · Harvard Science Book Talk, Harvard Science Center
AI behaves like an organism. We have no idea what's going on inside.
President, Machine Intelligence Research Institute at the time
Reported by The Tech (MIT) on 9 April 2026; he added that "ignoring it right now is really stupid".
Nate Soares makes the case against artificial superintelligence →
25 Nov 2025 · Interview · Persuasion
if anyone builds artificial superintelligence, which is to say an artificial intelligence that is better than the best human at every mental task, then the most likely outcome of the creation of that technology is literally everybody on the planet dying.
President, Machine Intelligence Research Institute at the time
Interview with Yascha Mounk.
Nate Soares on Why AI Could Kill Us All →
25 Sept 2025 · Podcast · Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The World Unpacked
We need to come together again, like we have before and not build machines that are smarter than us while having no idea what we're doing.
President, Machine Intelligence Research Institute at the time
Arguing for an international halt modelled on past arms-control agreements.
Will AI Kill us All? Nate Soares on His Controversial Bestseller →
15 Jun 2022 · Post · LessWrong
once AI capabilities start to generalize in this particular way, it's predictably the case that the alignment of the system will fail to generalize with it.
Executive Director, Machine Intelligence Research Institute at the time
A central AI alignment problem: capabilities generalization, and the sharp left turn →