Checked 9 September 2026
We checked
Claim: Credible researchers estimate approximately a 10% probability that advanced AI will cause human extinction
Yes — this holds up: the largest published survey of AI researchers found median extinction/loss-of-control risk estimates right around 10%, with other credible surveys and named researchers landing in a comparable 5-20% range. The figure is real but sensitive to how the question is worded, so treat "10%" as representative of a range rather than a precise consensus number.
Claim: Credible researchers estimate approximately a 10% probability that advanced AI will cause human extinction
SupportedThe largest survey of published AI researchers (Grace et al., AI Impacts, 2,778 respondents) found median estimates of 5% on most extinction-risk phrasings and exactly 10% on the 'loss of control' phrasing, with roughly 38-51% of respondents giving at least a 10% chance to extinction-level outcomes; other credible efforts (e.g., a forecasting tournament with domain experts) put expert medians around 6%, and prominent researchers like Yoshua Bengio have cited figures as high as 20%, so 'approximately 10%' sits squarely within the range credible researchers have actually reported, though the exact figure shifts noticeably depending on question wording.
ReferencesToby Ord's book The Precipice assigns a specific personal estimate of roughly 1-in-10 for existential risk from unaligned AI this century, distinct from any survey of researchers.
AI Impacts runs its Expert Survey on Progress in AI; a majority of the ~700 respondents put at least 5% probability on extinction-level outcomes from advanced AI, with a smaller subset (roughly a third to half) reaching 10% or higher.
AI Impacts' follow-up survey of 2,778 researchers repeats the finding: median answer 5%, but 38-51% of respondents (depending on question wording) gave at least a 10% chance to extinction-level outcomes.
Major outlets (New York Times opinion piece by Yuval Harari et al., Vox, the New Yorker) summarize the survey as 'half of AI researchers say there's a 10% or greater chance of human extinction,' collapsing the median (5%) and the 10%-or-more subgroup into a single simplified number.
The figure traces to two separate strands that get conflated in popular retellings. Philosopher Toby Ord assigned a specific 1-in-10 (10%) probability to unaligned AI causing human extinction this century in his 2020 book The Precipice, and that number has since been cited as if it represents 'researchers' generally rather than one person's calculation. Separately, AI Impacts' large surveys of AI researchers (2022 and 2023) found a median 5% chance of extinction-level outcomes, with roughly 38-51% of respondents putting the chance at 10% or higher—a distinction that got flattened by outlets like the New York Times, Vox and the New Yorker into the simpler, more viral claim that 'half of AI researchers say there's a 10% chance of extinction.'
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