Nate Soares

Nathaniel Soares is an American artificial intelligence author and researcher known for his work on existential risk from AI. In 2014, Soares co-authored a paper that introduced the term AI alignment, the challenge of making increasingly capable AIs behave as intended. Soares is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. In 2025, Soares co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. In the book, he argues that creating vastly smarter-than-human AI (or superintelligence) “using anything remotely like current techniques” would very likely result in human extinction; he further contends that AI alignment remains nascent and that international regulatory intervention will likely be required to prevent developers from racing to build catastrophically dangerous systems. The book received mainstream attention and mixed reviews: The Guardian selected it as "Book of the day" and described it as "clear" though its conclusions are "hard to swallow"; The Washington Post characterized it as a polemic that offers few concrete instructions; and The New Yorker featured it in "Briefly Noted." Coverage also included reporting in Wired, Semafor, and SFGATE.