people
Daniel Kokotajlo
Researcher at the AI Futures Project working on AI governance and risk
Daniel Kokotajlo is a researcher associated with the AI Futures Project, where he focuses on the intersection of technical AI development and the governance frameworks needed to keep powerful systems aligned with human interests. His work sits between policy and engineering: drawing attention to how deployment incentives, institutional concentration, and opaque model behavior can combine to create systemic risk well before any putative "superintelligence" emerges.
Kokotajlo has been active in public forums and community discussions addressing pacing, verification, and distributed oversight of capabilities. He argues for practical measures—rigorous safety verification, privileged auditing arrangements, and international cooperation—that make it harder for competitive pressures to drive unsafe shortcuts. Across his writing and talks he stresses that questions of governance and incentives matter as much as the technical details of model architectures.
Why he matters to this community: Kokotajlo's perspective bridges technical realism with political urgency. He highlights how even fallible, non‑agentic AI systems can amplify harms when deployed at scale and controlled by a few actors. His work reinforces the core claim of this site: without transparent oversight, robust inspection mechanisms, and a public that understands the stakes, we are effectively playing Russian roulette with civilization's most consequential technologies.
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