person
Ajeya Cotra
Open Philanthropy researcher; 'biological anchors' forecaster
AI grantmaker and forecaster whose biological-anchors report provides one of the most referenced quantitative models of transformative AI timelines. Has steadily shortened her estimates.
Profile
expertise
Policy / meta
Specialises in AI policy, regulation, governance, philanthropy, or movement strategy. Reads the technical literature but does not produce it.
Senior researcher at Open Philanthropy. Bio-anchors AI timelines report (2020) is foundational forecasting in the safety community. Forecaster; not a technical researcher.
recognition
Established
Reliable, recognised voice within their specific subfield. Cited and invited but not central to general AI discourse.
Highly cited inside safety circles. Less public profile.
vintage
Scaling era
Worldview formed during GPT-2/3, scaling laws, Anthropic's founding. Pre-ChatGPT but post-deep-learning. The 'scale is all you need' debate is live.
Bio-anchors AI timelines report 2020. Her forecasting frame is the scaling-era OpenPhil window.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Timelines
Transformative AI by 2040p=50%
stated 2022-08-02
Two-year update on my personal AI timelines · AI Alignment Forum
Strategy positions
Alignment firstendorses
Solve technical alignment before capability thresholds closeSupports mainstream alignment research funding and empirical work on 'playing the training game' failure modes.
My 2022 median for transformative AI dropped from roughly 2050 to the late 2030s.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Ajeya Cotra's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.