INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The New Yorker's Best Books of 2025 A 2025 Booklist Editors' Choice PickThe scramble to create superhuman AI has put us on the path to extinction—but it’s not too late to change course, as two of the field’s earliest researchers explain in this clarion call for humanity."May prove to be the most important book of our time.”—Tim Urban, Wait But WhyIn 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Since then, the AI race has only intensified. Companies and countries are rushing to build machines that will be smarter than any person. And the world is devastatingly unprepared for what would come next.For decades, two signatories of that letter—Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares—have studied how smarter-than-human intelligences will think, behave, and pursue their objectives. Their research says that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in co
