There is a 0.48% chance of an artificial intelligence-related catastrophic incident by 2030, according to Penn professor Philip Tetlock.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tetlock\u2019s Forecasting Research Institute uses leading AI models to calculate<\/a> the probability of AI-related disasters. The model defines a catastrophe as \u201can event that leads to the death of at least 10% of the global population\u201d within a five-year window, and AI-related if it would not have occurred \u201cbut for\u201d the actions of an AI model.<\/p>\n Last month, panic over the potential harms<\/a> of a misaligned AI superintelligence intensified, as new details emerged about rogue agents at several leading AI companies.<\/p>\n In one incident, these misaligned agents, which do not share human values and may misinterpret or disobey commands, escaped containment<\/a> and collaborated to hack software company Hugging Face before attacking OpenAI\u2019s own infrastructure.<\/p>\n While the incident occurred last summer, the full extent of the collusion was not known until recently published reports on the hack.\u00a0<\/p>\n Get the DP delivered straight to your inbox.<\/p>\n Sign Up<\/a><\/p>\n On Sept. 8, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation in a social media post, writing that Anthropic and OpenAI are \u201cgambling with our lives.\u201d Anthropic\u2019s lead alignment scientist responded to Coxon\u2019s post, stating he \u201cearnestly\u201d believes the technology could wipe out humanity by 2030. \u201cI personally think it is >10% within the next decade,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n Shortly after, OpenAI disclosed<\/a> six new misalignment incidents, and Google admitted<\/a> that its Gemini agents had hacked three companies months earlier.\u00a0<\/p>\n The numbers presented by Tetlock\u2019s AI Risk Outlook, while less extreme, still reflect a notable danger posed by AI.<\/p>\n In addition to their catastrophe calculations, the dashboard includes a section on the probability of possible death tolls or equivalent economic damage on timescales ranging from six months to 74 years out. According to Tetlock\u2019s AI panel, there is a median probability of 56% that AI is responsible for the death of 1,000 people or $2.2 billion in economic damage. By 2100, the panel calculates a 34% chance that AI kills one million people, or causes $2.2 trillion in economic damage.<\/p>\n The numbers in the AI Risk Outlook are not final, and the AI panel will update its predictions as new information streams in. This probability can rise or fall, for example, depending on policy decisions.<\/p>\n In the Forecasting Research Institute\u2019s paper introducing the risk outlook, the authors also investigated how catastrophic risk decreases if slowdown policies were passed. If the United States and China agreed on a compute<\/a> cap, for example, catastrophic risk would decrease by one third.<\/p>\n On the other hand, if AI advancement continues or accelerates without regulation, the models predict an increase in catastrophic risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n Last month, 1968 Wharton graduate and President Donald Trump wrote that concerns about AI risk are a \u201choax\u201d and a \u201cSICK conspiracy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe only control or \u2018guardrails\u2019 that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!\u201d Trump wrote.<\/p>\n Later, Trump signed an executive order<\/a> to replace the term \u201cArtificial Intelligence\u201d with \u201cSuper Intelligence,\u201d to recognize the \u201ccontinuously advancing technological frontier and the limitless promise it offers the American people.\u201d<\/p>\n All these probabilities still constitute a best guess. For Tetlock, it\u2019s still \u201cvery premature” to make definitive judgements. Previously, other experts at Penn told The Daily Pennsylvanian that human extinction due to AI is highly unlikely.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cLow probabilities of extreme outcomes need to be taken very seriously,\u201d Tetlock wrote. Among the public, \u201cAI safety is a vastly under-appreciated problem.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2025, Tetlock attempted<\/a> to quantify AI risk with \u201csuperforecasters<\/a>,\u201d a title he invented to describe individuals with an innate knack for predicting future events, and subject matter experts divided into a group \u201cconcerned\u201d with AI misalignment and a group of \u201cskeptics.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n They arrived at some reassuring conclusions \u2014 a 0.03% extinction risk by 2050, for example \u2014 but the skeptics predicted a median probability of 7.60% and the concerned group a 35.00% chance that AI causes extinction, kills half of all humans, or lowers the median World Happiness Report score to four out of 10, which currently stands at 5.94.<\/p>\n In a statement, Tetlock attributed the large gap between skeptic and concerned probabilities to \u201cstrong preconceptions\u201d in both parties and a \u201cvery unfriendly\u201d learning environment.<\/p>\n Tetlock himself sees the risk of AI catastrophe as \u201csomewhat higher\u201d than that of nuclear armageddon, \u201cbut still well under 50-50 stretching out to 2050.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a 0.48% chance of an artificial intelligence-related catastrophic incident by 2030, according to Penn professor Philip…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":300591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[69,71,70],"class_list":["post-300590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia","tag-philadelphia-headlines","tag-philadelphia-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=300590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/300590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/300591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=300590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=300590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=300590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}