In celebration of still being alive and fighting, we are giving away 1,000 Amazon e-books of “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”. Feel free to send a copy to yourself, a loved one, or a friend—we need all hands on deck.

Today marks exactly one year since If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, hit bookshelves as an instant bestseller. It was praised by many voices, ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to Steve Bannon to Yoshua Bengio, and was held up in the chambers of Congress by Representative Brad Sherman in January.

A lot has changed since September 2025. We'll do a quick recap, consider how the book aged, and then ask where we go from here.

Year in Review

2025 in general saw the rise of AI agents, such as Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. Run-of-the-mill programmers started “feeling the AI” as these agents became capable of automating hours-long software tasks.

By March of this year, Anthropic had stumbled upon nation-state-level hacking ability in Mythos, and shortly thereafter, in April, they announced Project Glasswing—an attempt to forestall an oncoming cybersecurity crisis.

In May, AI agents started breaking [...]

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Outline:

(01:13) Year in Review

(03:17) Claims

(03:20) Part One

(03:29) 1. Artificial superintelligence (ASI) will be created, and likely before too long

(04:17) 2. Modern AIs are black boxes

(04:42) 3. Powerful AI will behave as if it is pursuing goals

(05:39) 4. With current techniques, we can't reliably get AI to pursue the goals we want it to

(06:42) 5. By default, an ASI will have motives that are harmful to us

(07:40) 6. Humanity would not be able to defend itself against a rogue ASI

(08:42) Part Two

(11:02) Part Three

(12:18) The View From September 2026

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First published:
September 16th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BFrRJYgpBvziuuJLs/if-anyone-builds-it-everyone-dies-one-year-closer

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation

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“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, So8res, Duncan Sabien (Inactive)

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: One Year Closer” by Eliezer Yudkowsky, So8res, Duncan Sabien (Inactive)