Max Tegmark

It opens up entirely new possibilities for things that you can do—where you can go into battle or do a terrorist attack with zero risk to yourself, and you can also do it anonymously, because if some drones show up and start killing people somewhere ... more Verified source (2015)

Black-box audits are insufficient for ensuring that an AI is safe and robust. At a minimum, we need white-box audits where the auditor can look inside the AI and learn about how it reasons. Verified source

The path we're on right now is this race to replace, where you have a small number of incredibly powerful companies very openly saying that they want to build super intelligence, which, by definition, can replace every human job. [...] Polling sudden... more Unverified source (2026)

It might take two weeks or two days or two hours or two minutes. [...] It’s very appropriate to call this an “intelligence explosion”. AI Unverifiable source (2022)

Fully autonomous weapons systems and Orwellian AI-enabled domestic mass surveillance are affronts to our dignity and liberty. [...] Domestic mass surveillance of US citizens is a red line that should never be crossed. [...] Our safety and basic right... more Unverified source (2026)

[Alignment means] we lose control over it, AI is the boss of Earth. But for some reason that decides to be nice to us. This is what most of the companies are pushing for right now. And I think if it was more widely understood by politicians that this... more Unverified source (2026)

I really empathize for them, frankly, because they’re so stuck in this race to the bottom that they just feel an irresistible pressure to keep going and not get overtaken by the other guy. I think that’s why it’s so important to stigmatize the race t... more Verified source (2025)

[The lawsuits against AI chatbots] could spur concrete guardrails — such as requiring companies to test models for specific harms before deployment. [...] [The cases could break] the taboo that AI must always be unregulated. Unverified source (2026)

Our consciousness has to do with information being processed in certain ways and there's no reason whatsoever that machines can't when they do that. Unverified source (2023)

AI companies for years have stalled any broad and meaningful regulation of potential harms. It's their fault that we have the race condition in the first place. [...] All of [the AI labs] succumb to the incentives... It's just maybe Anthropic is the ... more Unverified source (2026)

There are some digital products (say CSAM and AI letting terrorists make bioweapons) that I oppose regardless of whether they are open-source or not, but I'm overall supportive of open source, and you can easily verify that my MIT research group defa... more Unverified source (2026)

if we humans lose control over our society to machines that are much smarter than us, then things can go just as bad for us. AI Verified source (2023)

I actually do not think it's a foregone conclusion that we will build AGI [artificial general intelligence] machines that can outsmart us all. Not because we can't … but rather we might just not want to. So why are obsessing about trying to build so... more AI Unverifiable source (2025)

Many believe it's impossible, just like it's impossible for chimpanzees to control us. [If superintelligence is built without solving this,] it's the end of the era where humans are in charge of Earth. Unverified source (2026)