Thanks everyone who came along! I think it'll be online as a recorded version shortly, possibly on the same link. Really appreciated some excellent questions (plus the opportunity to read up in advance on developments in mirror bacteria, asteroid monitoring etc, alongside my usual fare of AI risk).

Reminder that this is coming up this evening, 6-630pm UK! Drop along if you feel like it, open to all. cassyni.com/events/AKmfE...

I appreciated having the chance to speaking to Beatrice Nolan for this excellent piece on the Google/Pentagon contract. Grateful for journalists continuing to push for this to get the attention and scrutiny it deserved. fortune.com/2026/05/04/g...

Delight to be presenting my paper Extinction of the human species: What could cause it and how likely is it to occur? at Real World Challenges Seminar Series on 06 May 6pm UK. Anyone can join, link below. cassyni.com/events/AKmfE...

Pleased to have a commentary out today with Giulio Corsi in Philosophy and Technology. It's a response to a paper I'd recommend, Bridging the Divide: Using LLMs to Reshape Difficult Disagreements, 1/6

We’re proud to announce the winner of the 2025 Paper of the Year for #CambridgePrisms: Extinction🎉 Could humanity really face extinction? Read more #OA: https://cup.org/41e1jAo

🚨Hot off the press: A new study in Nature co-authored by CFI researchers introduces a methodology that can predict whether AI models will succeed or fail on unfamiliar tasks: www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/...

Pleased to share that my paper "Extinction of the human species: what could cause it and how likely is it to occur?" was awarded Cambridge Prisms: Extinctions (the journal)'s Paper of the Year award for 2025! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This is one of the new CFI developments I'm most excited about. Thrilled to have someone of Lucius' calibre here, and thrilled for us to be giving serious thought to this sort of question. www.lcfi.ac.uk/news-events/...

A new pre-print "A Labour of Harm: Artificial Intelligence and Biological Weapons Acquisition" discusses how focusing on technological capability risks overlooks the human processes through which biological weapons are imagined Read here⬇️ papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Nice article on the Anthropic/pentagon saga, good work Harry and Billy time.com/article/2026...

'm getting this made up in glossy as a poster. It'll be on my wall next to my black-and-white photo mockup of Big Pete H benching, with the 'defective altruism' quote beneath it. Decades from now, I'll frame it and hang it in my loo l1/2

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the group effective altruism. you perhaps occasionally, under certain circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"

Excellent statement from the Center for Democracy and Technology’s @alexreevegivens.bsky.social, who notes that concern about today’s action is wide ranging and bipartisan www.linkedin.com/posts/alexan...

RT from Jonathan Birch on twitter. "Say what you like about Effective Altruism, Pete Hegseth is not ranting about Kantians or virtue theorists trying to thwart his mass surveillance/autonomous weapons programs."

"Ó hÉigeartaigh said that the outcome of the dispute could extend well beyond Anthropic itself. “If the Pentagon comes out on top of this,” he said, “it will establish precedents that will not be good for the independence of these companies, or their ability to hold to ethical standards.”" 1/2

I'm quoted in this rather good Fortune article about the Anthropic/Pentagon situation. They got my wrole wrong (the CSER role is 3 years ago at this point; apologies to present CSER Director Sonja Amadae) but I'm happy with the quotes, so I'll take that. fortune.com/2026/02/27/p...

It was nice to discover I'm quoted in this Independent article on the India AI Summit: www.independent.co.uk/asia/india/a...

Google DeepMind and OpenAI colleagues: you know what to do. notdivided.org

I was pleased to participate in this great wargame. No idea if I show up in doc, premiers next month. Incredible to see how far the collab btw Intelligence Rising, i3 Gen and Faculty has come. Carefully thinking thu these possibilities has never felt so necessary. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVsn...

I was pleased to contribute to this article, which I hear is now quite controversial on this site ;) www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

This is incredibly good: www.transformernews.ai/p/the-left-i...

Nice to see our paper debunking claims of a link between autism and the microbiome among Neuron's "Most Read" articles... 😊 www.cell.com/neuron/fullt...

This weekend's break reading was Ursula LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven. Not at all about AI, but could not be more apt to it: a cautionary tale about the risks of putting unimaginable power in the hands of a centrally-planned world /authoritarian government mindset, even with the best of intentions. 1/2

This paper wins my 'longest in the pipeline' award; the first preprint version hails from the misty forgotten era of 2023. I think it still has something to offer: a vision and characterisation of predictable AI. Privilege to be a small part of this great team. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The Doomsday Clock is now 85 seconds to midnight. In our response to the @thebulletin.org announcement, we reflect how new forms of global cooperation are essential for navigating today’s risks and how meaningful progress is still possible. Read the full response below ⬇️ bit.ly/49KSNOC

CEOs of Anthropic and Deepmind (both AI scientists by background) this week predicting AGI in 2- and 5- years respectively. Both stating clearly that they would prefer a slow down or pause in progress, to address safety issues and to allow society and governance to catch up. 1/5

It will be interesting to see if the shift currently happening fosters appetite for cooperation between middle powers on AI - e.g. Europe, Canada, Brazil and others. Because there are real opportunities there. And it could be very good for the world to have another pole 1/2

A snowy start to the New Year in Cambridge!❄️

I'm so excited to see ILINA's upcoming year cecilyongo.medium.com/ilina-in-202...

As this year draws near its close, my greatest hope is for a kinder 2026.

An honour to provide a paper for the Bulletin's 80th anniversary, on the challenges AI poses for catastrophic risk the coming decade. An exercise in navigating uncertainty and the collingridge dilemma, with the stakes likely rising with each passing year. thebulletin.org/premium/2025...

I really enjoyed chatting to Philip Bell about 'AGI race' claims and the AI race narrative overall. Link to podcast below techfuturesproj.substack.com/p/is-china-r...

Had a blast speaking to the MARS fellows last week about prospects for international cooperation on AI safety, great power competition in AI, evidence supporting 'AI race' claims. Great discussion - calibre of these fellows is remarkable. They'll do important things. www.cambridgeaisafety.org/mars

Right - so as the relatively rare Irishman who is also a Russia/FSU geek I guess I have to have Thoughts and Opinions after yesterday's revelations. First off - I don't think that this was an attempted assassination or other "kinetic" mission. The goal here seems to have been purely psychological /1

It's a rainy saturday, so I thought I'd bump our 'AI for sustainable development' report from the WIC programme from earlier this year. I thought it was a very good report, and folks might find it useful. www.wicinternet.org/pdf/Governin...

Things are looking smoothly exponential for AI over the past several years, and I continue to think this is the best default assumption (until the AI R&D automation feedback loop eventually speeds everything up)

This will be a fascinating test case. The AI industry (a16z, OpenAI & others) are running the crypto fairshake playbook. But that worked because crypto was low-salience; most people didn't care. People care about AI. 1/4 www.techbrew.com/stories/2025...

Extremely excited to launch this report; the second report from World Internet Conference's International AI Governance Programme that I co-Chair with Yi Zeng. It goes further than any similar report I've seen in recommending robust governance interventions 1/4 www.wicinternet.org/pdf/Advancin...

Pleased to have a new paper in Internationale Politik, in which I call for (a) more of a global conversation around AGI and superintelligence. (b) 'middle powers' to start exerting themselves in the global conversation. internationalepolitik.de/de/goldene-z...

Thoroughly enjoyed this speech by the excellent Matt Clifford. Much of it is also relevant to Ireland, where it pairs well with John Collison's overlapping-in-diagnosis&recommendations Irish Times article from the previous week (link in comment). www.youtube.com/watch?v=McMt...

I cowrote this paper w a great team of Chinese and UK colleagues in 2019/20. Just noticed it's had by far its most citations this year. An indicator, I hope, that the appetite for international cooperation on AI safety & governance is stronger than ever. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Excited to head to Beijing tomorrow for an action-packed week. Launching an international cooperation network with my friend and colleague Yi Zeng; participating in a frontier AI Safety and Governance forum; and presenting on my cooperation/competition work at a Tsinghua Roundtable.

Because there's more happening (and more in need of philanthropic support!) than AI risk, check out this great writeup by Mike Cassidy and Lara Mani on their volcanic risk work and charity - innovative and neglected. forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jAcCjF...

Impactful job for the right candidate here. Based on my meetings and discussions, the UK government remains the one grappling most deeply with the implications of frontier AI and possibility of AGI, including the attendant risks. jobs.lever.co/futureof-lif...

He made us all suffer the national indignity of That Elon Musk Bletchley interview, and didn't even manage to wrangle a job out of it? I'm never going to look at Dishy Rishi the same way again.

I really enjoyed being part of this excellent discussion yesterday on the future of global AI governance, with Kayla Blomquist, Dan Fagella, Duncan Cass-Beggs, Nora Ammann and Robert Whitfield, skilfully Chaired by David Wood. Catch up with it here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EADx...

Important report. Given how long it takes/competitive it is to get tenure these days, too often academia basically asks women to choose between an academic career and motherhood, which is unacceptable. (There being ultra-capable subset who manage both doesn't make it reasonable). Needs to change.

Well this was an interesting way to discover that my (considerate, charming) wife sometimes reads my social media posts.

As of today I am officially a Research Professor! I will be celebrating by having "Professor Seán: Doomometrics Studies" socks made, and submitting a paper tonight with some excellent coauthors that I hope will be a banger (in appropriate Research Professor fashion).