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How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the world

blog.ai-futures.org · 4,433 words · saved by 1 readers

If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power.1 This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one, the AIs were misaligned and outside any human’s control; in the other, the government semi-nationalized AI before the point of no return, and the CEO was only one of several stakeholders in the final oversight committee (to be clear, we view the extreme consolidation of power into that oversight committee as a less-than-desirable component of that ending). Nevertheless, it seems to us that a CEO becoming effectively dictator of the world is an all-too-plausible possibility. Our team’s guesses for the probability of a CEO using AI to become dictator, conditional on avoiding AI takeover, range from 2% to 20%, and the probability becomes larger if we add in the possibility of a cabal of more than one person seizing power. So here we present a scenario where an ambitious CEO does manage to seize control. (Although the s

How an AI company CEO could quietly take over the world ... Alex Kastner Oct 21, 2025 84 15 7 Share If the future is to hinge on AI, it stands to reason that AI company CEOs are in a good position to usurp power. 1 This didn’t quite happen in our AI 2027 scenarios. In one, the AIs were misaligned and outside any human’s control; in the other, the government semi-nationalized AI before the point of no return, and the CEO was only one of several stakeholders in the final oversight committee (to be clear, we view the extreme consolidation of power into that oversight committee as a less-than-desi

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