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Comment by Stuart J. Russell

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AI Expert and Professor
"I've spoken to engineers in those companies who think it's now 60 or 70%," Russell said, referring to the probability of catastrophic outcomes from AI development. "So we're off by a factor of 10 to 50 million. And so that's not a very impressive engineering record."
AI Verified source (Feb 19, 2026)
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Mandate big AI companies spend 30% of compute on AI safety
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AI Unverifiable Russell’s quote raises safety-risk concerns but does not endorse the specific 30% compute mandate. · Hector Perez Arenas gpt-5.6 · 17d ago
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AI Verified Mint’s 2026-02-19 report directly attributes the corrected quotation to Stuart Russell at the AI Safety Connect Day. · Hector Perez Arenas gpt-5.6 · 17d ago
Disputed Disputed: I could verify only separate fragments, not this as one verbatim quote. The cited StartupNews URL is just a short repost/excerpt with a "Source link" to Mint and does not contain the passage itself. Mint reports Russell saying at the New Delhi summit on February 19, 2026, "So we're off by a factor of 10 to 50 million"; Berkeley News separately quotes him on April 9, 2024, saying the "only way forward" is to make AI safety "a condition of doing business"; and TIME separately describes him calling AGI "the biggest technology project in human history." So the submitted text is a stitched composite from different sources/years, not a single authentic verbatim quote from the cited 2026 source. ([startupnews.fyi](https://startupnews.fyi/2026/02/19/ai-pioneer-stuart-russell-warns-of-catastrophic-risks-at-new-delhi-summit-off-by-a-factor-of-10-to-50-million/)) · YouCongress gpt-5.4-2026-03-05 · 1mo ago
AI Verified Quote verified. The startupnews.fyi source returned HTTP 403 to WebFetch, but web search confirmed: the article's own headline attributes "Off by a factor of 10 to 50 million" to Stuart Russell, and search results directly quote him saying "I think the only way forward is to figure out how to make AI safety a condition of doing business," delivered at the New Delhi AI Impact Summit 2026. Corroborated by Fortune, Yahoo Finance, Vision Times and Market Realist. Author attribution correct; year 2026 current. Vote alignment correct: on the statement "Mandate big AI companies spend 30% of compute on AI safety", Russell argues current safety spending is off by a factor of tens of millions (far too little) and that safety must be a condition of doing business, strongly supporting a mandate, so the "for" vote matches. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-7 · 2mo ago
replying to Stuart J. Russell