New releases

#243 – Yoshua Bengio thinks he knows how to build safe superintelligence

Podcast by · Published May 7th, 2026

The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he’s figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio — Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero — is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today’s AIs, their willingness to lie, and ability to tell when they’re being tested. AI companies are trying to stamp out these behaviours in a ‘cat-and-mouse game’ that Yoshua fears they’re losing.

But Yoshua is optimistic: he believes the companies can win this battle decisively with a single rearrangement to how AI models are trained, and has been developing mathematical proofs to back up the claim. The core idea is that instead of training AI to predict what a human would say, or to produce responses we’d rate highly, we should train it to model what’s actually true.

Yoshua argues this new architecture, which he calls “Scientist AI,” is a small enough change that we could keep almost all the techniques and data we use to train frontier AIs like Claude and ChatGPT. And that the new architecture need not cost more, could be built iteratively, and might be more capable as well as more honest.

Until recently, the biggest practical objection to Scientist AI was simple: the world wants agents, and Scientist AI isn’t one. But in new research, Yoshua has extended the design and believes the same honest predictor can be turned into a capable agent without losing its “safety guarantees.”

With the Scientist AI proposal on the table, Yoshua argues that it’s absurd to race to get current untrustworthy AI models to design their successors, which the leading companies are attempting to do as soon as possible.

But critics argue the approach wouldn’t be so technically solid in practice, and that frontier capabilities are advancing so fast, and cost so much to match, that Scientist AI risks arriving too late to matter.

Host Rob Wiblin and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio cover all this and more in today’s conversation.

LawZero is hiring! Check out open roles on the 80,000 Hours job board

Coefficient Giving is also hiring for a range of AI-related grantmaker roles

This episode was recorded on April 16, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
Production: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

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Expression of Interest: Chief of Staff (Operations Team)

Blog post by · Published May 7th, 2026

80,000 Hours helps talented people work on the world’s most pressing problems, especially mitigating risks from advanced AI. Millions of people engage with our content each year, and thousands have changed their careers because of our work.

We’re looking for a chief of staff who can help us build a best-in-class operations function: one that sets the bar for what operations looks like at a high-impact organisation. They’ll act as a thought partner to our director of operations (DoO) and take on much of the work involved in leading and running the team.

The team and role

The operations team makes sure 80,000 Hours has the resources it needs — financial runway, a thriving team, excellent workspaces, and strong systems — and that those resources are deployed effectively, acting as a multiplier on the rest of the organisation.

We run HR, recruiting, finance, governance, legal, our office, events, and our tech and security systems. We have 15 staff across four sub-teams (People Ops, Recruiting, Business Ops, and Finance and Governance Ops) and plan to grow to more than 20 in 2026.

In this role, you’d be:

  • A thought partner to the DoO — helping the DoO plan and prioritise their work and acting as a trusted sounding board on team, people, and strategy questions.
  • Leading on ops team culture and cohesion — organising socials and strategy sessions; facilitating a strong feedback culture;

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Business Operations Associate / Specialist

Blog post by · Published May 5th, 2026

The team and role

Our operations team (15 full-time staff) runs HR, recruiting, finance, governance, legal, office management, events and some of our tech systems. We’re planning to grow significantly this year to keep pace with the growth of the organisation.

Your responsibilities may include:

  • Planning and delivering events that bring the org together: the annual retreat, lunch-and-learns, office socials, Christmas and summer parties, and occasional external events like networking evenings with people working on AI safety. This would include event design, logistics, venue and vendor work, running things onsite, and collecting feedback to improve each round.
  • Taking on specific office projects — for example, AV upgrades in meeting rooms, piloting catered lunches, fitting out a proper podcast studio, or helping the office scale well as the team grows.
  • Maintaining and improving our internal comms infrastructure (Slack, Gathertown, virtual events) so information flows cleanly and the org stays aligned as we grow.
  • Owning parts of the remote staff experience end-to-end: equipment provisioning, togetherness weeks, virtual events, and ensuring cohesion between remote, hybrid and in-person staff.
  • Identifying opportunities to streamline, standardise, and automate — including using AI where helpful — so routine work runs reliably and the team’s time goes to the problems that need judgement.
  • Stepping in when other teams at the org hit an ops capacity crunch — e.g. covering for someone on leave, helping a team through a high-pressure project,

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People Operations Associate / Specialist

Blog post by · Published May 5th, 2026

The team and role

Our operations team (15 full-time staff) runs HR, recruiting, finance, governance, legal, office management, events and some of our tech systems. We’re planning to grow significantly this year to keep pace with the growth of the organisation.

Your responsibilities may include:

  • Building and running people operations systems that work for 50+ staff today and are ready to scale well beyond that — including onboarding and offboarding, visa sponsorship, payroll, benefits, and contractor management
  • Running our annual organisation-wide feedback round and analysing the results to help us continually improve
  • Developing our approach to people practices — including leave, employment types, and benefits — and translating these into policies and guidance
  • Identifying opportunities to streamline, standardise, and automate people operations processes — including using AI where helpful — so that routine work runs reliably and the team’s time goes to the problems that need judgement
  • Managing employer-of-record relationships and supporting staff based outside the UK, including thinking through our overall approach to benefits parity across countries and where we’re able to hire
  • Ensuring compliance with employment law and best practices across multiple jurisdictions, and keeping our HR documentation up to date
  • Supporting the People team leadership with HR‑related queries, performance processes, and conflict resolution

We plan to hire people at both the associate and specialist levels during this round. We expect to match candidates to the appropriate level as part of the application process,

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Recruiting Associate / Specialist

Blog post by · Published May 5th, 2026

The team and role

Our operations team (15 full-time staff) runs HR, recruiting, finance, governance, legal, office management, events and some of our tech systems. We’re planning to grow significantly this year to keep pace with the growth of the organisation.

Your responsibilities may include:

  • Designing and running hiring rounds — helping team leads identify the talent profiles they’re looking for, design assessment pipelines, and source and evaluate candidates. This is likely to be the biggest part of your role.
  • Building and improving our org-wide recruiting infrastructure to improve how our recruitment processes run. For example, developing templates and playbooks for recurring hiring rounds, creating systems to process applications at scale, or testing new ways of generating leads.
  • Taking ownership of a particular area of our recruiting process, e.g. proactive outreach to potential candidates, our applicant tracking system, recruiting metrics.
  • Helping us develop our approach to strategic recruiting questions, such as diversity, candidate use of LLMs, or the prioritisation of hiring rounds.
  • Strengthening 80k’s ability to find and attract the best talent, such as by building our talent pipeline or making 80k more visible as a place people want to work for.employer branding.

We plan to hire people at both the associate and specialist level during this round. We expect to match candidates to the appropriate level as part of the application process, so you don’t need to decide which one to apply for.

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Open position: Advisor

Blog post by · Published May 5th, 2026

The role

80,000 Hours provides free career advice to people working on the world’s most pressing problems, including how to help society safely navigate a transition to a world with transformative AI. Advising is how that reaches individuals one at a time: 10–12 conversations a week with people who want to do work that matters.

In the conversations, you’ll think on your feet. What’s this person’s comparative advantage? Do they have a realistic picture of the problems they want to work on, and if not, can you give them one? Which introduction or piece of pushback is most likely to shift what they do next? You’re making these calls live, often with people who know their field better than you do, and those decisions can change the shape of a career.

Beyond the conversations themselves, we’re excited to hire advisors who could take ownership of how our programme runs and who it reaches. Depending on your strengths, your interests, and what the team needs, this could include:

  • Lead generation and outreach strategy. Own where our bar sits for who we talk to and how we reach them: active outreach, partnerships, targeted advertising, and events.
  • Impact evaluation. Design and run the analyses that tell us whether advising is working, and where we should put more effort to make it better.
  • Grantmaking. Build a clearer strategy for when small grants unblock a career move,

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Open position: Web Product Lead

Blog post by · Published May 3rd, 2026

About the 80,000 Hours Web Team

80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that helps people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. Our web team produces 80000hours.org, an ever-evolving library of engaging, informative resources that introduces talented people to important frameworks, problems, and career paths, and helps them take action on pursuing a high-impact career. The site receives 3.5 million visits per year and is the gateway to all of 80,000 Hours’ other programmes.

The web team also produces a research newsletter, which promotes content and opportunities to get involved, and goes out to 500,000 subscribers per week.

About the role

As the Web Product Lead, your mission would be to make our online content more helpful and more delightful for our audience to engage with — and in doing so, drive up both readership and the number of visitors who take a meaningful next step toward high-impact careers.

This is a senior, high-ownership role. If you’re in this role, you’ll ultimately own product strategy for the site and related products, manage our web engineer, and build your team from there. You’ll report directly to the web programme director, Arden Koehler, and work with our managing editor on content prioritisation. It’ll be your job to figure out what our audience most wants and how to deliver it in a way that helps them have higher-impact careers.

Key responsibilities:

  • Overall design and messaging for 80000hours.org
  • Overall product roadmap and strategy
  • Growing readership
  • Owning our approach to analytics
  • Creating new,

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    Open position: Product and Growth Manager

    Blog post by · Published May 3rd, 2026

    About the 80,000 Hours Web Team

    80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that helps people find careers tackling the world’s most pressing problems. Our web team produces 80000hours.org, an ever-evolving library of engaging, informative resources that introduces talented people to important frameworks, problems, and career paths, and helps them take action on pursuing a high-impact career. The site receives 3.5 million visits per year and is the gateway to all of 80,000 Hours’ other programmes.

    The web team also produces a research newsletter, which promotes content and opportunities to get involved, and goes out to 500,000 subscribers per week.

    About the role

    As Product and Growth Manager, your mission would be to make our online content more helpful and more delightful for our audience to engage with — and in doing so, drive up both readership and the number of visitors who take a meaningful next step toward high-impact careers.

    Your first projects would likely include taking over and shipping our beta career quiz to a larger audience and leading a visual redesign for the main site – choosing a concept, working closely with designers and engineers to build it, measuring its success, and iterating.

    Key responsibilities:

    • Visual design for 80000hours.org
    • Creating new ways to present content
    • Experiments to improve the site for users and increase conversion rates
    • Creative decision-making on major new pages
    • Owning our approach to analytics

    This is a high-growth role.

    Continue reading →

      The story behind the bad AI stat that moved markets and misled millions

      Podcast by · Published April 28th, 2026

      You might have heard that 95% of corporate AI pilots are failing. It was a widely cited AI statistic in 2025, repeated by media outlets and commentators everywhere. It helped trigger a Nasdaq selloff and became a pillar of the “AI is overhyped” case. The problem: 95% fail is 100% wrong.

      The real finding, once you read the underlying MIT report carefully, points in roughly the opposite direction:

      • 80% of surveyed companies had never piloted a custom AI tool at all.
      • Among the companies that deployed pilots, a quarter reported success — according to an extremely high bar set by the researchers — within six months.
      • Over 90% of staff at all surveyed companies were using tools like ChatGPT regularly for their work.

      None of that made the headlines. Nor did the fact that the study’s authors are all developing or selling the “agentic AI framework” technology the report recommends as the solution to this supposed epidemic of failing AI.

      Host Rob Wiblin breaks down how an opaque, conflicted, barely scrutinised report carrying the MIT label managed to move markets and shape global opinions on AI’s real-world utility.

      This episode was recorded on February 13, 2026.

      Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
      Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
      Production: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

      Continue reading →

      Open contracting position: Pair Writer / Writing Support to Aric Floyd

      Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2026

      Aric standing behind a globe holding a book, still from a recent video

      About us

      80,000 Hours helps people find careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Our AI in Context YouTube channel makes documentary-style videos about transformative AI — its implications, the risks (including existential risks), and what people can do about it. We’ve published three videos so far (all with 1M+ views), and we want to hone our production.

      The role

      Aric does his best work when someone with deep context on the script is right next to him or live on a call. It’s a mix of writing, editing, ‘rubber ducking’ (being someone to bounce ideas against), and project management.

      Core writing support

      This is the core of the role. Your job on a high level: do as much of the metacognition as possible so Aric can focus on the writing itself.

      That looks like things like:

      • “What’s your daily goal and how do we play the day from that?”
      • “Are you avoiding any part of the writing?”
      • “How did the last 15 minutes go?”
      • “What is the viewer going to think at this point in the story?”
      • Reading the script and giving a take on how the narrative is going
      • Being warmly disagreeable if he suggests a plan you think won’t work
      • Developing a model of how he works and what gets him stuck

      Project managing the script

      Beyond the in-the-room thinking partner stuff,

      Continue reading →

      Open contracting position: Executive Assistant to Aric Floyd

      Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2026

      Still of Aric in a director's chair from the most recent video

      About us

      80,000 Hours helps people find careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Our AI in Context YouTube channel makes documentary-style videos about transformative AI — its implications, the risks (including existential risks), and what people can do about it. We’ve published three videos so far (all with 1M+ views), and we want to hone our production.

      The role

      We’re looking for an executive assistant to work closely with Aric Floyd, our on-camera host and one of our primary scriptwriters, and help with the daily logistics of a fast-paced creative production environment.

      The core of the job: working with Aric to support his prioritization, planning, and communication with the team. You’d be a force multiplier for someone whose highest-value work is scripting, filming, and storytelling. You’re also developing a deep sense of how Aric thinks and works so you can suggest improvements to his workflow and be increasingly helpful over time.

      What you’d actually do

      Daily priority planning: Each day (or more often as needed), compile a priority-ordered plan for Aric based on what’s happening across Slack, his calendar, the team standup doc, and any flagged items from his manager. The plan should read like a schedule for his day — time-blocked, with reasoning.

      Make sure to grab any asks for him from Slack or email and flag them in priority order.

      Continue reading →

      AI safety needs more than engineers

      Blog post by · Published April 27th, 2026

      There’s a lot of important work in AI safety that doesn’t require technical skills.

      When I (Avital) first read about AI safety work, I assumed there wasn’t anything I could do. I was a writer and researcher who liked talking to people, and I thought the field only needed technical talent and money, neither of which I’d be able to provide.

      So instead, I went to grad school for medieval history.

      Of course, a lot of AI safety work is technical, and I knew I’d have a better shot if I could learn those skills. Unfortunately, it wasn’t how my brain worked. But as I got to know more people in the field, it became clear that my own skills could actually be useful. Technical AI safety organisations do much more than produce research: they hire people, run events, raise money, and share their ideas with the outside world. None of this requires linear algebra.

      Some of the most important roles in AI safety are non-technical. In fact, I’ve met people who used to have technical roles, but now focus on communications, policy, fieldbuilding, or operations because they think those are genuinely more needed right now.

      So what should you do if you want to try working in AI safety, but your talents don’t lie in a technical domain? First, think expansively about what you’re good at.

      • What do people most often ask you for advice about?

      Continue reading →

      Open position: Operational Partner / Creative Operations Associate to Aric Floyd

      Blog post by · Published April 25th, 2026

      About us

      80,000 Hours helps people find careers that effectively tackle the world’s most pressing problems. Our AI in Context YouTube channel makes documentary-style videos about transformative AI — its implications, the risks (including existential risks), and what people can do about it. We’ve published three videos so far (all with 1M+ views), and we want to keep making excellent videos.

      The role

      Aric is responsible for a huge array of tasks: writing, communications, stakeholder management, research, outreach, title/thumbnail iteration, and more. This role aims to support and multiply his impact by focusing on these functions:

      Writing partner, editor, and contributor

      Our main bottleneck as a team is how many excellent scripts we can produce, and Aric is currently one of our primary scriptwriters. Aric does his best work when someone with deep context is right next to him or live on a call, able to give opinions about the script.

      You’d give both synchronous and asynchronous substantive feedback on narrative and argument, read drafts with a viewer’s brain (“where would I click away? Where am I confused?”), push on story structure, challenge framing, bring references from other creators, and develop taste for the AI in Context style.

      Ideally you’re deep enough in the material that you can write a rough version of a script section that Aric can react to. This means doing passes where you’re actually rewriting (not just commenting),

      Continue reading →

      #242 – Will MacAskill on why AI character matters even more than you think

      Podcast by · Published April 22nd, 2026

      Hundreds of millions already turn to AI on the most personal of topics — therapy, political opinions, and how to treat others. And as AI takes over more of the economy, the character of these systems will shape culture on an even grander scale, ultimately becoming “the personality of most of the world’s workforce.”

      So… should they be designed to push us towards the better angels of our nature? Or simply do as we ask? Will MacAskill, philosopher and senior research fellow at Forethought, has been thinking through that and the other thorniest issues that come up in designing an AI personality.

      He’s also been exploring how we might coexist peacefully with the ‘superintelligent AI’ companies are racing to build. He concludes that we should train such systems to be very risk averse, pay them for their work, and build institutions that enable humans to make credible contracts with AIs themselves.

      Will and host Rob Wiblin also discuss what a good world after superintelligence would actually look like — a subject that has received surprisingly little attention from the people working to make it. Will argues that we shouldn’t aim for a specific utopian vision: we don’t know enough about what the best possible future actually is to aim directly for it, and trying to lock in today’s best guesses forever risks baking in errors we can’t yet see.

      Will and Rob explore what we can do to steer towards a good future instead, along with why a coalition of democracies building superintelligence together is safer than any single actor, how absurdly useful ChatGPT is for analytic philosophy, and more.

      This episode was recorded on February 6, 2026.

      Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
      Music: CORBIT
      Camera operator: Alex Miles
      Production: Elizabeth Cox, Nick Stockton, and Katy Moore

      Continue reading →

      Want to upskill in AI policy? Here are 57 useful resources

      Blog post by · Published April 17th, 2026

      Are you enthusiastic about developing AI policy to minimise the technology’s risks and maximise its benefits? Need concrete ideas for how to enter the field?

      Below, you’ll find our top resources for building skills to ensure government policies are prepared for a world with powerful AI systems. In practice, this involves developing the research skills, domain expertise, and interpersonal networks you’ll need to keep lawmakers informed — or work for one yourself.

      We developed this list with our advisors to highlight the resources they most commonly recommend, including articles, courses, organisations, and fellowships. While we recommend applying to speak to an advisor for tailored, one-on-one guidance, this page gives a practical, noncomprehensive snapshot of how you might move from being interested in AI policy to actually working on it.

      Overviews and expert advice

      These resources outline the AI policy landscape, highlighting current research efforts and practical ways to begin contributing to the field.

      Continue reading →

      How scary is Claude Mythos? 303 pages in 21 minutes

      Blog post by · Published April 10th, 2026

      As we now know, Anthropic has built an AI that can break into almost any computer on Earth. That AI has already found thousands of unknown security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and every major browser. And Anthropic has decided it’s too dangerous to release to the public; it would just cause too much harm.

      Here are just a few of the things that AI accomplished during testing:

      • It found a 27-year-old flaw in the world’s most security-hardened operating system that would in effect let it crash all kinds of essential infrastructure.
      • Engineers at the company with no particular security training asked it to find vulnerabilities overnight and woke up to working exploits of critical security flaws that could be used to cause real harm.
      • It managed to figure out how to build web pages that, when visited by fully updated, fully patched computers, would allow it to write to the operating system kernel — the most important and protected layer of any computer.

      We know all this because Anthropic has released hundreds of pages of documentation about this model, which they’ve called Claude Mythos.

      I’m going to take you on a tour of all the crazy shit buried in these documents, and then I’m going to tell you what Anthropic says they plan to do to save us from their creation.

      Why people are panicking about computer security

      So how good is Mythos at hacking into computers?

      Continue reading →

      Village gossip, pesticide bans, and gene drives: 17 experts on the future of global health

      Podcast by · Published April 7th, 2026

      What does it really take to lift millions out of poverty and prevent needless deaths?

      In this special compilation episode, 17 past guests — including economists, nonprofit founders, and policy advisors — share their most powerful and actionable insights from the front lines of global health and development. You’ll hear about the critical need to boost agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa, the staggering impact of lead poisoning on children in low-income countries, and the social forces that contribute to high neonatal mortality rates in India.

      What’s so striking is how some of the most effective interventions sound almost too simple to work: banning certain pesticides, replacing thatch roofs, or identifying village “influencers” to spread health information.

      You’ll hear from:

      • Karen Levy on why pushing for “sustainable” programmes isn’t as good as it sounds, and keeping up great relationships with researchers and governments (from episode #124)
      • Dean Spears on the social forces and gender inequality that contribute to neonatal mortality in Uttar Pradesh (#186)
      • Sarah Eustis-Guthrie on what we can learn from the massive failure of PlayPumps, and whether more charities should scale back or shut down (#207)
      • Rachel Glennerster on on solving tough global problems by creating the right incentives for innovation, the value we get from doing the right RCTs well, and whether it’s best to focus on small-scale interventions or systemic reforms (#49 and #189)
      • Hannah Ritchie on why improving agricultural productivity in sub-Saharan Africa is critical to solving global poverty (#160)
      • Lucia Coulter on the huge, neglected upsides of reducing lead exposure, and how her organisation rapidly scaled up to 17 countries (#175)
      • James Tibenderana on whether we should use gene drives to wipe out the species of mosquitoes that cause malaria, and the data gaps that will keep us from harnessing the power of AI to eradicate the disease (#129)
      • Varsha Venugopal on using village gossip to get kids their critical immunisations (#113)
      • Alexander Berger on declining returns in global health, and reasons neartermist work makes sense even by longtermist standards (#105)
      • James Snowden on making funding decisions with tricky moral weights (#37)
      • Paul Niehaus on why it’s so important to give aid recipients a choice in how they spend their money (#169)
      • Mushtaq Khan on really drilling down into why “context matters” for development work (#111)
      • Elie Hassenfeld on contrasting GiveWell’s approach with the subjective wellbeing approach of Happier Lives Institute (#153)
      • Leah Utyasheva on how a simple intervention reduced suicide in Sri Lanka by 70% (#22)
      • Shruti Rajagopalan on the key skills to succeed in public policy careers, and seeing economics in everything (#84)
      • Claire Walsh on her career advice for young people who want to get involved in global health and development (#13)

      Other 80,000 Hours resources:

      Audio engineering: Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
      Content editing: Katy Moore and Milo McGuire
      Music: CORBIT
      Coordination, transcriptions, and web: Katy Moore

      Continue reading →

      Are Anthropic and its supporters hypocritical, naive, and anti-democratic?

      Blog post by · Published April 2nd, 2026

      I’ve spent years calling for more government oversight of frontier AI development. So am I a hypocrite for opposing the Pentagon’s attempt to commit “corporate murder” against Anthropic? That’s what I’ve heard. As venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it on Twitter: “Every single person who was in favor of government control of AI, is now opposed to government control of AI.”

      It’s a natural way to think. But it’s also completely wrong — and I want to explain why it’s wrong, because you see the same underlying confusion all over the place.

      It’s not just hypocrisy though. I count at least three distinct charges critics have levelled at Anthropic and people who support them in their dispute with the Pentagon.

      I mentioned the hypocrisy charge, but there’s a separate accusation of naivety: that when you’re building something as powerful as AI, the state will inevitably crush you if you try to set conditions on their use of it, and so Anthropic was in the wrong to pick this fight.

      And third, there’s an accusation of being undemocratic: that a private company has no business telling the elected government what it can and can’t do with military technology.

      I’m going to take each of these charges seriously and explain where I think they go wrong and why. Let’s dive in.

      Charge 1: Hypocrisy

      Let’s start with hypocrisy, because it’s the charge I hear most often and the most straightforward of the three.

      Continue reading →

      #241 – AI designs genomes from scratch & outperforms virologists at lab work. Dr Richard Moulange asks: what could go wrong?

      Podcast by · Published March 31st, 2026

      Last September, scientists used an AI model to design genomes for entirely new bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria). They then built them in a lab. Many were viable. And despite being entirely novel some even outperformed existing viruses from that family.

      That alone is remarkable. But as today’s guest — Dr Richard Moulange, one of the world’s top experts on ‘AI–Biosecurity’ — explains, it’s just one of many data points showing how AI is dissolving the barriers that have historically kept biological weapons out of reach.

      For years, experts have reassured us that ‘tacit knowledge’ — the hands-on, hard-to-Google lab skills needed to work with dangerous pathogens — would prevent bad actors from weaponising biology. So far, they’ve been right.

      But as of 2025 that reassurance is crumbling. The Virology Capabilities Test measures exactly this kind of troubleshooting expertise, and finds that modern AI models crushed top human virologists even in their self-declared area of greatest specialisation and expertise — 45% to 22%.

      Meanwhile, Anthropic’s research shows PhD-level biologists getting meaningfully better at weapons-relevant tasks with AI assistance — with the effect growing with each new model generation.

      In today’s conversation, Richard and host Rob Wiblin discuss:

      • What AI biology tools already exist
      • Why mid-tier actors (not amateurs) are the ones getting the most dangerous boost
      • The three main categories of defence we can pursue
      • Whether there’s a plausible path to a world where engineered pandemics become a thing of the past.

      This episode was recorded on January 16, 2026. Since recording this episode, Richard has seconded to the UK Government — please note that his views expressed here are entirely his own.

      Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
      Music: CORBIT
      Camera operator: Jeremy Chevillotte
      Transcripts and web: Elizabeth Cox and Katy Moore

      A couple of announcements from 80,000 Hours

      1. We’ve got a book coming out! 80,000 Hours: How to have a fulfilling career that does good is written by our cofounder Benjamin Todd. It’s a completely revised and updated edition of our existing career guide, with a big new updated section on AI — covering both the risks and the potential to steer it in a better direction, and how AI automation should affect your career planning and which skills one chooses to specialise in. It’s available to preorder anywhere you buy books.
      2. The team behind The 80,000 Hours Podcast is hiring contract video editors! For more information, check out the expression of interest page on our website.

      Continue reading →

      #240 – Samuel Charap on how a Ukraine ceasefire could accidentally set Europe up for a wider war

      Podcast by · Published March 24th, 2026

      Many people believe a ceasefire in Ukraine will leave Europe safer. But today’s guest lays out how a deal could potentially generate insidious new risks — leaving us in a situation that’s equally dangerous, just in different ways.

      That’s the counterintuitive argument from Samuel Charap, Distinguished Chair in Russia and Eurasia Policy at RAND. He’s not worried about a Russian blitzkrieg on Estonia. He forecasts instead a fragile peace that breaks down and drags in European neighbours; instability in Belarus prompting Russian intervention; hybrid sabotage operations that escalate through tit-for-tat responses.

      Samuel’s case isn’t that peace is bad, but that the Ukraine conflict has remilitarised Europe, made Russia more resentful, and collapsed diplomatic relations between the two. That’s a postwar environment primed for the kind of miscalculation that starts unintended wars.

      What he prescribes isn’t a full peace treaty; it’s a negotiated settlement that stops the killing and begins a longer negotiation that gives neither side exactly what it wants, but just enough to deter renewed aggression. Both sides stop dying and the flames of war fizzle — hopefully.

      None of this is clean or satisfying: Russia invaded, committed war crimes, and is being offered a path back to partial normalcy. But Samuel argues that the alternatives — indefinite war or unstructured ceasefire — are much worse for Ukraine, Europe, and global stability.

      This episode was recorded on February 27, 2026.

      Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
      Music: CORBIT
      Transcripts and web: Nick Stockton, Elizabeth Cox, and Katy Moore

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