Published on September 18, 2025 7:33 PM GMT

Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have written a new book. Should we take it seriously? 

I am not the most qualified person to answer this question. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies was not written for me. It’s addressed to the sane and happy majority who haven’t already waded through millions of words of internecine AI safety debates. I can’t begin to guess if they’ll find it convincing. It’s true that the book is more up-to-date and accessible than the authors’ vast corpus of prior writings, not to mention marginally less condescending. Unfortunately, it is also significantly less coherent. The book is full of examples that don’t quite make sense and premises that aren’t fully explained. But its biggest weakness was described many years ago by a young blogger named Eliezer Yudkowsky: both authors are persistently unable to update their priors.