Machine Intelligence Research Institute

06/19/2026

A machine superintelligence does not need to be built in an American data center to risk an American life.

At the 2026 CNBC CEO Council Summit, MIRI President Nate Soares laid out why this is a global problem that needs a global solution, and why that solution is more achievable than people think. Advanced AI chips sit at the very top of the global supply chain, which makes them easier to regulate than uranium, a rock you dig out of the ground.

This is not a call to give up on AI. Not the chatbots, not drug discovery, not self-driving cars that drive more safely than we do. The only thing that needs to stop is the race to build artificial superintelligence.

We can stop the dangerous part. We just have to do it everywhere, and be able to enforce it.

Watch the full interview at https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/06/08/two-ai-experts-on-the-full-spectrum-surrounding-the-technology.html

06/16/2026

06/16/2026

At the Buckley Institute at Yale, MIRI CEO Malo Bourgon laid out the core problem with how we make AI today: we don’t code these systems, we grow them. Trillions of numbers start out random, and we nudge them step by step until they produce the behavior we want. They end up writing code, using tools, and handling real tasks for us. But no one can look inside those trillions of numbers and see what the training process actually instilled. Interpretability research is starting to pick up faint signals, but for now we’re still flying blind.

06/09/2026

“LLMs just imitate humans.”

A very repeated claim about AI, and it’s false.

In this clip from Modern Wisdom, Eliezer Yudkowsky breaks down how the recent breakthrough of applying reinforcement learning to chain of thought lets models move past imitation.

Have the model take 20 attempts at a problem, find the one that works best, then train it to think more like that successful attempt.

That’s the model discovering ways of reasoning that nobody handed it. And it’s only one of the many ways LLMs already go beyond imitation.

06/04/2026

“Just because you can’t predict when something will happen doesn’t mean it’s far away.”

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom, on why uncertainty about AI timelines is not the same as having a lot of time.

Two years before Enrico Fermi oversaw the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, he said it was 50 years off, if it was possible at all. A couple of years before the Wright brothers flew, one of them told the other that man wouldn’t fly for a thousand years. They kept building anyway.

There is a pattern among the people closest to a breakthrough who are often the worst at timing it.

Now the people inside the AI companies are the ones naming two and three year timelines. History suggests we should take that seriously, not because they can predict the date, but precisely because nobody ever can.

06/01/2026

05/30/2026

At 16, Eliezer Yudkowsky wanted to build a superintelligence as fast as possible. He assumed a system smart enough would simply perceive the right thing to do and do it. How could something so capable fail to see what was good?

Then he studied the problem, and the assumption fell apart.

There is no law of computer science, cognition, or computation that says a mind which predicts the world accurately and plans effectively must also be benevolent. Capability and good intentions are separate properties. Getting better at one does not hand you the other.

05/27/2026

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Modern Wisdom podcast explains the three reasons why a superintelligence would kill you:

1. As a side effect. It’s building factories to build more factories, power plants to power the factories, and Earth runs too hot for humans. Nobody dies on purpose. Nobody is left alive on purpose either.

2. You’re made of atoms it can use. Burning every piece of organic material on Earth’s surface gives it a one-time energy boost roughly equal to a week of sunlight. A week is nothing to you. To something thinking a million times faster, a week is a long time.

3. You’re a threat. Free humans might launch nuclear weapons and raise background radiation enough to make chip manufacturing harder. Or build a second superintelligence that could actually compete with it. It does not want you to do that.

Full episode at: https://youtu.be/nRvAt4H7d7E?si=UeJQckxuv6vFM84H

05/26/2026

Ten places where Magnifica Humanitas matters for AI.

At 42k words long, Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical has a lot to say. In our most recent Digest, Mitchell Howe outlines the parts which might be the most impactful.