EA, AI risk, and not getting distracted

If your feed is anything like mine, you might have been hearing more about effective altruism this week. I think the key underlying reason for the surge is that concern about the risks from advanced AI have been getting more airtime recently, and EA was early to those concerns.

What’s driving the surge in attention on AI risks?

• OpenAI's Hugging Face attack (https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/)
• METR/Redwood’s investigation of the hack came out, and (correctly IMO) freaked a lot of people out. (e.g. https://x.com/binarybits/status/2092708164433052123, https://x.com/SenJohnKennedy/status/2100984894075658539, https://x.com/BarackObama/status/2102425377272455204, https://x.com/HawleyMO/status/2098137490590679396)
• Jacob Coxon’s resignation went mega viral as the first time a lot of people heard the (crazy, true) fact that lots of people building the most advanced AI systems think there’s a >10% chance they will kill everyone.
• That’s moving public opinion in a big way (https://x.com/davidshor/status/2100300687003259292, https://www.semafor.com/article/09/16/2026/the-public-wants-a-say-in-ai-development)

What does any of this have to do with effective altruism?

Well, effective altruism is a community that developed mostly online starting in the early 2010s around using evidence and reason to do the most good (especially with your donations and career choice). Three very different focuses have all been popular in the EA community since the beginning: effective giving in global health and development (e.g., donating to the kinds of organizations @givewell recommends, which do things like distribute bednets to prevent the spread of malaria), trying to reduce suffering for farm animals (which are orders of magnitude more numerous, treated vastly worse, and receive way less philanthropic attention than animals in shelters), and reducing risks to the future of humanity, especially from advanced AI. I personally came into this work from the global health angle - I had started working at GiveWell before the term “effective altruism” was coined - but Coefficient Giving, the funder I cofounded and now lead, over time came to fund work across all three of these streams of work (in addition to many other areas that aren’t typically associated with EA, such as the YIMBY movement to build more housing, work on science policy to accelerate discovery and economic growth, and research on new treatments for neglected diseases).

OK, so the EA community was early to work on AI safety, and CG has been funding a lot of the key players working on AI safety for a long time. As AI risk concerns have popped over the past couple of months, that’s led to more scrutiny on the EA community for IMO a mix of good and bad reasons.

I think the good reason is genuine curiosity (and maybe some healthy skepticism!) about these connections - where did the ideas of the people who are now leading giant AI companies come from? Why is everything in this world so interconnected? (My answer: it used to be a really small world - very few people were thinking about this stuff or taking it seriously until just a few years ago, so of course the ones who were found each other and started collaborating. It’s kind of wild IMO looking back how prescient some of the early writing from this world was (e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like). At the time, I was skeptical - I mostly just worked on global health and I was like “I dunno about this SV crowd freaking out about AI, how much can we really predict this stuff” but holy shit they were way more right than me, and I’ve moved in their direction a lot.)

But I think the bad reasons are unfortunately mostly self-interested. A bunch of powerful actors stand to benefit from unchecked AI progress, and they’re doing everything in their power to demonize or dismiss anyone with concerns. This leads to disproportionate discussion of EA because EA is interested in neglected and underappreciated ways of doing good. That makes it open to weird ideas. And people, very disproportionately with a financial stake in the AI fight, are trying to make it about EA instead, because EA being weird is much safer territory for them than the rather uncomfortable fact that many of the people making the most advanced AIs think that they might kill everyone.

(FWIW, my personal estimation of the risks is a lot lower than many of the folks who worry about this stuff. In debates like this one (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/03/the-great-inflection-a-debate-about-ai-and-explosive-growth), I often feel more sympathetic to the perspective of folks like my colleague @mattsclancy than the people on the other side, and I have a lot of time for @binarybits critiques (http://understandingai.org/p/the-case-for-ai-doom-isnt-very-convincing). I think a big part of the difference with more worried folks is that I expect society to react more vs sleepwalk into a crisis. But it is not lost on me that folks like @ajeya_cotra and @RyanGreenblatt who are more worried have had outstanding and falsifiable recent forecasting track records (http://theaidigest.org/2025-ai-forecasting-survey), making way better predictions than I would have. So I think their perspectives need to be taken seriously. And of course a single digit percent chance of everyone dying is way too high!)

Where should this leave you?

I think the main thing is not to get distracted. You absolutely do not have to be an EA, care about EA, or like EA, at all, to care about risks from AI and to be engaged on this issue. Everyone from Josh Hawley to the Pope to Obama are weighing in now, and that is great. This conversation was always too big and too important for any one community to drive. It’s unfortunate that we need to play catch up as society because until this year it was too weird for most people to want to engage with, and I think that should generate some grace for people who were earlier to these topics than most of us (certainly than I was). But it’s great the conversation is broadening now and it’s good to focus on the merits of where we are now and the appropriate policy response rather than getting caught up in the (in some sense unsurprising) fact that the people who were willing to think weird thoughts about the future of AI ten years ago were also interested in other weird ideas. If you’re not into weird ideas, that’s fine, you can just do you, you shouldn’t let this history stop you from engaging.