#253 – AI 2027's author returns with a plan to change the ending | Daniel Kokotajlo

Last year, Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues published AI 2027 — a scenario read by millions, including US Vice President Vance. AI 2027 ended in human extinction or an irreversible concentration of power caused by superintelligent AI. Now his team has published what they think should happen instead.

AI 2040: Plan A depicts the US and China striking a verified deal to ban runaway intelligence explosions, so that superintelligence arrives in 2040 — after a cautious decade spent solving alignment, spreading the technology’s power widely, and keeping the whole thing reversible — rather than in the next few years.

This slowdown would still involve economic growth roughly doubling every year, and only 8% of Americans in paid work by the mid-2030s. In other words, it’s a slowdown that would feel faster than any period in human history — bewildering, materially abundant, and socially chaotic all at once.

Daniel and host Luisa Rodriguez dig into what it would take to enact this vision for the future, how the US and China could come to an agreement to slow down AI development, and the likeliest alternatives to Plan A — both good and disastrous.

Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/dk26

This episode was recorded July 27–28, 2026.

Chapters:

• Who’s Daniel Kokotajlo? (00:00:00)
• AI 2040: Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable (00:00:28)
• AI 2040’s five possible futures (00:09:10)
• The five biggest problems superintelligent AI poses (00:15:43)
• The Hugging Face hack demonstrates real-world loss of control (00:28:18)
• The blueprint for a US–China AI slowdown (00:34:03)
• Why a long slowdown would still feel incredibly fast (00:39:53)
• How Plan A addresses loss of control of AI (00:51:44)
• How Plan A addresses concentration of power (01:12:18)
• How Plan A addresses great power conflict, unemployment, and misuse of AIs (01:41:28)
• How the US and China could agree on a slowdown (01:45:56)
• What if we focused on a US-only slowdown first? (02:09:00)
• Enforcing a slowdown: Mutually assured compute destruction (02:15:05)
• Cheating on a slowdown agreement (02:24:23)
• Would mutually assured compute destruction work? (02:30:42)
• Is slowing down or shutting down better? (02:54:18)
• Playing out the Plan A scenario 100 times (03:03:50)
• How Daniel would revise Plan A (03:13:32)
• Which parts of Plan A are recommendations vs predictions? (03:23:02)
• Plan A’s likeliest failure mode (03:26:52)
• What the US can do now to make Plan A possible (03:31:16)
• How AI 2027 is holding up (03:43:05)
• Our podcast team is hiring (03:46:45)

Our production team includes:

• Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Ollie Bignell, Andrés Escobar, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
• Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
• Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran