An Overview of Catastrophic AI Risks: Summary

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.

We’ve recently published on our website a summary of our paper on catastrophic risks from AI, which we are cross-posting here. We hope that this summary helps to make our research more accessible and to share our policy recommendations in a more convenient format. (Previously we had a smaller summary as part of this post, which we found to be insufficient. As such, we have written this post and have removed that section to avoid being duplicative.)

Executive summary

Catastrophic AI risks can be grouped under four key categories which we explore below, and in greater depth in CAIS’ linked paper:

• Malicious use: People could intentionally harness powerful AIs to cause widespread harm. AI could be used to engineer new pandemics or for propaganda, censorship, and surveillance, or released to autonomously pursue harmful goals. To reduce these risks [...]