Toby Ord

Philosopher; author of 'The Precipice' (2020); senior researcher on AI governance and scaling

University of Oxford

Safety researchers

Ord is the Oxford philosopher whose 2020 book estimated a one-in-six chance of civilisational catastrophe this century, with unaligned AI the single biggest risk at one in ten. He now argues nobody should be confident about timing—his own median for transformative AI is 2038 with huge error bars—and that governments should hedge against it coming early.

Their number

10%

"I think that there's about a 50% chance that we create something that's more intelligent than humanity this century. And then there's only an 80% chance that we manage to survive that transition, being in charge of our future. If you put that together, you get a 10% chance." (80,000 Hours Podcast, March 7, 2020, on 'The Precipice' estimate of 1-in-10 existential risk from unaligned AI over the next 100 years)
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On timing

Distribution for transformative AI with a median of 2038 and an 80% interval from 3 to 100 years: "The correct epistemic response to the lasting expert disagreement is to have a broad distribution over AI timelines." (Broad Timelines, March 9, 2026)

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What they call for

  • Governments and civil society to hedge against transformative AI coming early
  • Treat existential risk as a top global priority
  • Scrutiny of scaling economics and inference costs

In their own words

  • "I strongly recommend governments, civil society, and academics do more to hedge against transformative AI coming early." / "We're in a race against AI timelines. It is just that we don't know if that race is a sprint or a marathon."

    9 March 2026

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  • 'The Precipice' FAQ: "My best guess is that humanity faces a one-in-six chance of existential catastrophe over the next century," with unaligned AI the largest single contributor.

    2020-03

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  • Series of 2025 analyses arguing recent gains come mostly from inference scaling and that RL scaling is extremely inefficient (e.g. 'Evidence that Recent AI Gains are Mostly from Inference-Scaling').

    3 October 2025

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Signed

  • CAIS extinction statement 2023 (reported; not independently re-verified on this pass)

Last verified 1 September 2026

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