Nate Soares: podcast appearances and interviews

Nathaniel Soares is an American artificial intelligence researcher and author specializing in existential risk associated with artificial intelligence. He is known for his co-authorship of a 2014 paper that introduced the concept of AI alignment, which concerns ensuring that increasingly capable AI systems behave as intended. Soares serves as the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. In 2025, he co-authored the book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. The book discusses the risks of creating vastly smarter-than-human AI using current techniques, emphasizing that such efforts could very likely lead to human extinction. Soares argues that AI alignment remains an early-stage challenge and suggests that international regulatory intervention will probably be necessary to prevent competitive races among developers that could produce catastrophic systems. The publication garnered mainstream attention and received mixed reviews from outlets including The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Coverage of the work also appeared in Wired, Semafor, and SFGATE.