person
Connor Leahy
CEO of Conjecture; EleutherAI co-founder turned AI safety hawk
Helped start the open-source AI movement (EleutherAI) then pivoted to arguing that uncontrollable AI means the future belongs to AI rather than humans. Calls for a compute-cap moratorium on frontier training.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
CEO of Conjecture; co-founded EleutherAI which trained GPT-Neo and Pythia. Hands-on ML background. Conjecture publishes alignment papers and the Compendium policy document.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Recurring figure in AI-safety podcasts and policy circles. Recognised broadly inside the field; less so to the general public.
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.
Co-founded EleutherAI 2020 (GPT-Neo). His public profile rises with scaling-era open replication; Conjecture (2022) is the policy follow-on.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Pauseendorses
Halt frontier training until alignment catches upArgues for 'a moratorium on frontier AI runs' implemented through a cap on compute, enforced internationally.
“If they just get more and more powerful, without getting more controllable, we are super, super fucked. And by 'we' I mean all of us.”
If you build systems that are more capable than humans at manipulation, business, politics, science and everything else, and we do not control them, then the future belongs to them, not us.
Context: Commentary around the Bletchley Park AI Safety Summit.
Interpretability betopposes
Mechanistic interpretability is necessary and sufficient to know models are safeArgues current alignment approaches, including interpretability-only bets, are not sufficient; sometimes explicitly pessimistic about the research path.
“The truth is, I do not know how to build an aligned system and I don't even know where to start.”
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Connor Leahy's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.