On 30 May 2023 the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) published a deliberately short Statement on AI Risk. The entire statement reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
The brevity was intentional. By keeping the statement to a single sentence, the organizers made it possible for people who disagreed about timelines, mechanisms, and policy to sign a shared claim about priority. It functioned as a coordination device: signing did not commit anyone to a specific theory of how AI might cause harm, only to the view that extinction-level risk deserved serious attention.
The signatories included figures who rarely appear together. Among them were the deep-learning pioneers and Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, alongside the chief executives of the leading frontier labs: Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic, and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind. The fact that lab leaders building the most advanced systems publicly endorsed the same warning gave the statement much of its weight, and it became a reference point in the policy debates that followed.