Nate Soares

Nate Soares is an American AI-risk researcher and the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), the Berkeley organization that pioneered AI alignment research years before the field had a name. A former Google and Microsoft engineer, he joined MIRI in 2014 and became its executive leader in 2015, taking over from founder Eliezer Yudkowsky and steering the institute’s shift from technical alignment research toward public advocacy after concluding the technical problem would not be solved in time.

If anyone builds it, everyone dies

In September 2025 Soares and Yudkowsky published “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All” (Little, Brown), which became a New York Times bestseller within weeks. The book’s argument is in its title: superintelligence built by anyone, anywhere, by anything like current methods, ends with human extinction — not from malice but because grown-not-crafted systems pursue goals nobody chose. The authors call for an international halt to superintelligence development, enforced the way nuclear proliferation is.

The book split expert opinion: some researchers praised it for making the alignment case legible to policymakers, while critics — including many working ML engineers — called its certainty unearned and its proposed moratorium unenforceable. Soares has toured podcasts and legislatures making the case anyway, arguing that a technology whose failure mode is extinction does not get the benefit of the doubt.