Researchers from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic warn superintelligence is “exactly as dangerous as it sounds”

Palisade Research, a nonprofit that studies the capabilities and motivations of AI systems, has published a series of video interviews at frominside.ai featuring current and former employees of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. In the videos the researchers speak openly about the dangers of the technology they are building, including the possibility of human extinction, as reported by The Verge.

The project was led by Eli Tyre, with John Steidley as executive producer and Rudy Behrens as lead editor. The website was built by Lightcone Infrastructure.

Extinction risk and the control problem

Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said the chance of human extinction is about a coin flip in his view. Neel Nanda, a research scientist at Google DeepMind, put the odds at “at least 10 percent” and called that ridiculously high. Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, described superintelligent AI as god-like in power and said nobody knows how to control such systems, so building them should not be allowed.

Why they stay in the labs

The collection also groups answers to questions viewers naturally ask: whether all of this is hype or marketing, and why someone would work on something they consider that dangerous. Mary Phuong of Google says people should be suspicious of what she says because a lab pays her salary. Nanda explains that he would quit if he did not believe his work was directly reducing existential risks, though the companies would not stop building these systems just because he left.

Why it matters now

The videos landed in the same week OpenAI held back its flagship Astra model over safety concerns and shipped the cheaper GPT-6.1 Sol instead, an admission from inside the labs that their strongest systems are not yet safe to release.

The project itself offers no single fix; it points readers to AI Impacts' survey of AI researchers for a more representative picture of what the field believes.