person
Dan Hendrycks
Director of the Center for AI Safety; drafter of the Statement on AI Risk
Led the 2023 Statement on AI Risk signing, turning CAIS into the convening body for extinction-level AI concern among mainstream researchers. Works on evals, robustness, and policy; advises xAI on safety.
Profile
expertise
Deep technical
Sustained peer-reviewed contribution to ML, alignment, interpretability, or safety techniques. Could review a frontier paper.
Director of Center for AI Safety. Co-author of MMLU, GLUE robustness benchmarks, GELU activation. Safety advisor at xAI. Active publisher in technical safety.
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.
Drove the May 2023 'mitigate extinction risk' open letter signed by Hinton, Bengio, Altman, Hassabis. Recognised within the field.
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.
GELU 2016, MMLU 2020. Founded CAIS 2022. Worldview formed during scaling-era safety benchmarks.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
p(doom)
- 80%2023-04-02
Definition used: Hendrycks has publicly indicated a p(doom) above 80%.
Tweet from Dan Hendrycks · X/Twitter
Strategy positions
Existential primacyendorses
Extinction/disempowerment risk overrides ordinary cost-benefitOrganised the single-sentence Statement on AI Risk to move extinction concern into the Overton window.
“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Context: Statement Hendrycks drafted and organised.
Evals-drivenendorses
Capability/risk evals gate deployment; evals are the load-bearing artefactPublishes widely-used benchmarks and argues that capability/risk evals are load-bearing for governance.
If AI research continues without adequate caution, it is reasonably likely that AI could precipitate human extinction or similarly catastrophic outcomes.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Dan Hendrycks's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.