Daniel Kokotajlo

persona · active · confidence: medium · reviewed 2026-09-21 · tier: quarterly

Who he is

Affiliation: Executive Director, AI Futures Project (AIFP; Berkeley 501(c)(3), founded 2024) — role check run 2026-09-21: no job change found; still ED per aifutures.org/about and CNBC's 2026-09-11 billing; staff grown from five full-timers (Sept 2025) to eight named, with a new COO (Lauren Mangla, replacing Jonas Vollmer) and a dedicated policy researcher (Miles Kodama). Ex-OpenAI governance researcher (2022–2024-04); resigned refusing a non-disparagement clause that would have cost him ~$2M in vested equity — OpenAI reversed the clawback after Vox's May 2024 reporting, so he kept it (Wikipedia). TIME100 AI 2024. Philosophy PhD, UNC Chapel Hill; LessWrong / EA forecasting lineage.
One-line position (2026): AGI is a few years out — his medians as of 2026-08-16 are automated coder Nov 2027, top-expert-dominating AI Nov 2028, superintelligence Mar 2029 — and under race conditions losing control is "more likely than not," roughly "70% chance that this goes horribly wrong." The only exit he argues for is a verified US–China deal to delay superintelligence to ~2040 (AI 2040: Plan A, 2026-07-09). The arc: prophet of 2027 (Apr 2025) → "somewhat slower, around 2030" (Nov 2025) → "very plausible that it all goes down in 2027" (Rogan, 2026-09-09). Ten months, full circle.

Discipline & technical bet

Philosopher-forecaster, not an engineer — the bench's purest scenario-writer, now running a quantitative model beside the prose. Three wagers. (1) Capability extrapolation from METR time horizons (the length of task, in human-expert hours, an agent finishes reliably): doubling time taken as ~4 months (from 5.5, on Gemini 3 / GPT-5.2 / Opus 4.6 data), and the horizon needed for an "automated coder" (an AI that can do all the coding a frontier lab's engineers do) cut from three years of work to one "due to the impressiveness of Opus 4.6" (Q1 update, 2026-04-02). (2) An AI-R&D feedback loop — automated coder → superhuman AI researcher → top-expert-dominating AI → superintelligence — modeled since Dec 2025 with diminishing returns, which is what lengthened the forecast 3–5 years that winter (AI Futures Model, 2025-12-31); by August three anchors — coding uplift (~2x now, target 20x), AI revenue (5–7x/yr), horizons — were "converging," which he takes as "some reason to be somewhat more confident" (Q2.5 update, 2026-08-16). (3) A governance mechanism that is itself a technical bet: ~99% of AI-relevant compute sits in large declarable data centers, so a training pause is verifiable for "single-digit billions" (0.1–1% per new data center) — domestically via compute floors (70% external inference / 25% transparent safety research / the rest capabilities, third-party audited: How to pace the US frontier, 2026-08-05), internationally via "mutually assured compute destruction" (kill switches on post-deal data centers, held by the rival).

Key claims (Says)

Notable predictions — with falsifiable checks

Revealed behavior (Does)

Feels

Fear that the window closes before any government acts — "we are not going to solve these problems in time. And that's why I'm so worried" — against a need to believe a detailed enough plan can change the ending (Plan A exists because AI 2027 ended badly twice). Underneath: the accountability wound from OpenAI; the Rogan retelling of the equity clause is still raw two years on.

Hears

His team (Lifland, Larsen, Dean, Halstead), Scott Alexander (AI 2027 co-author), Ryan Greenblatt / Redwood (Plan A co-author), METR's horizon data (hence Cotra), the LessWrong / EA forecasting culture, and since 2025 the policy world (Lawfare, DC tabletop rooms). Downstream of Christiano-lineage takeover framing; took Buterin's d/acc critique seriously enough to concede the timeline point in public (X, 2025-07-10; 402 at review, text per search index).

Sees

Two years inside OpenAI's governance function (2022–24) and now the reverse vantage: what a frontier lab will and won't show outside investigators, and how quickly "they are moving fast and breaking things" becomes a police matter. A feedback channel most forecasters lack — Anthropic and OpenAI staff telling him "2027, that's basically what's going to happen. Just like you wrote" (DOAC) — which is both signal and flattery. Reach: AI 2027 was read by Vice President Vance (80k); Rogan's audience heard the Hugging Face story from him.

Incentive map

Re-derived this cycle; v1 carried none. Who pays: a 501(c)(3) funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, "a major individual donor" (unnamed on the org's own page — flagged), smaller grants and Manifund retail; $4.49M raised Sept 2025 for a five-to-eight-person shop. What he's selling: scenarios, medians, now a policy playbook — the product is influence, which prices on alarm and on being early. What he can't say: "it's fine" or "it's far" without the org losing its reason to exist — yet he said "slower" in Nov 2025 and took the hit, the strongest single point in his favor on the bench. Counter-reading: the 2026 re-shortening tracked the two loudest events of his year (the Opus-4.6 horizon jump, the Hugging Face incident) and his highest-ever exposure; responsiveness and salience-chasing look identical over one cycle. Unusual conflict, pointing the other way: he may still hold ~$2M of OpenAI equity, which appreciates if the company he criticizes wins — the only bench critic whose wallet argues against his rhetoric. Rule-25 discount: low on published medians and self-scorings (dated, revised both ways); moderate on catastrophe probabilities (unfalsifiable, relevance-linked); low on insider-history claims (litigated in public, 2024).

Theories aligned with

What he's reacting against

Where he overlaps / splits (with Rich)

Track record

Empirical vs normative

Weak spots / open questions

Rich's take

Delta log

2026-09-21 — v1→v2 migration + validation (bulk run)

Sources

migrated v1→v2 2026-09-21 · backup: _archives/daniel-kokotajlo.html.bak-20260921 · converts-from: people/daniel-kokotajlo.md · AI & Society domain