--- title: Daniel Kokotajlo: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 description: Find out why Daniel Kokotajlo made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. canonical: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2025-08-26T19:51:27.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T11:54:42.275Z article:section: Business og:title: TIME100 AI 2025: Daniel Kokotajlo og:description: Find out why Daniel Kokotajlo made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence og:url: https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ab8d09b12669bf8/6998c923e2d64b756bc5f9a2/Daniel-Kokotajlo.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME100 AI 2025: Daniel Kokotajlo og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: TIME100 AI 2025: Daniel Kokotajlo twitter:description: Find out why Daniel Kokotajlo made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ab8d09b12669bf8/6998c923e2d64b756bc5f9a2/Daniel-Kokotajlo.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 26, 2025 # Daniel Kokotajlo AI researcher by [Billy Perrigo](https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/) ## Billy Perrigo Correspondent  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Source Photo: Ian C. Bates—The New York Times/Redux) Back in 2021, when machine learning was just a niche subfield of the tech industry, researcher Daniel Kokotajlo wrote a blog post titled “What 2026 looks like.”In it, he accurately predicted the explosion of chatbots, along with the rise of “inference-time scaling”—or squeezing out performance increases by letting AIs run for longer. In April of this year, after a stint at OpenAI, Kokotajlo published a lengthy new essay called AI 2027: a detailed forecast of how so-called superintelligence might arrive to the world. In it, he and his co-authors predict that by 2026, AI companies will train models that begin to automate the job of AI research itself. By 2027, these models will have trained a series of even more powerful successors—AIs that are smarter than human geniuses in all fields, that can be copied hundreds of thousands of times, and which can think and communicate with one another inconceivably faster than humans can. AI 2027 describes how the advent of this technology could consume world affairs. In this scenario, although the scientists who built it are unsure whether AIs are plotting against them, they choose to forge ahead. After all, years of remarkable scientific progress are now being achieved in weeks, and the specter of China, only months behind in its own AI project, means they cannot take their foot off the gas. The U.S. presidential administration is now being advised by tentacles of this superintelligent AI hivemind—an entity so smart, so efficient, and such a pleasure to talk to that nobody can imagine going back to the way things were. The problem is that the AIs are, in fact, conspiring against them. Nobody has solved the so-called alignment problem—the tricky challenge of defining how an entity more intelligent than humans should act, and then holding it to those rules. By 2027, in Kokotajlo’s telling, AI will transcend the human language it was trained on and begin thinking and communicating in _neuralese_—an incomprehensible datastream that makes understanding, let alone overseeing, its actions impossible. After a few short years of stratospheric economic growth, where the superintelligent AI consolidates control over world affairs, it finally acts on a long-held plan to eliminate the obstacle of humans entirely. By 2030, the human race is wiped out by a series of biological weapons and drone attacks. Kokotajlo co-authored AI 2027 after hosting a series of war games with participants from leading AI labs—exercises where players were encouraged to imagine out, repeatedly and specifically, what actions might follow from present events. But he cautions that the scenario is just that: a best guess at where the world might be headed; one possible path among many. Trying to predict exactly what a superintelligence might do, the scenario notes, is like trying to predict what moves a chess grandmaster might choose to beat you with. But Kokotajlo doesn’t want his essay to lead to resignation. Quite the opposite. AI 2027has an alternate ending. In that one, humanity recognizes that it is ceding control over its future to an unreliable entity. Political pressure succeeds in forcing the U.S. government and top AI companies to reject the seductive appeal of handing over power; the U.S. and China strike an arms control-style deal. AIs still exist, but they are forced to reason in language, not neuralese, making them less intelligent but more aligned. The world is still chaotic and unequal; the question of who exactly should have the power to control AI remains a contested one. But humanity has avoided the worst-case scenario. AI 2027 made a huge splash upon its release this April. Perhaps most notably, U.S. vice president J.D. Vance said he had read it. So have the leaders of top AI companies, according to Kokotajlo. The essay received its fair share of pushback—some from people who ridiculed it as science fiction, or counterproductive, or too confident in its predictions. (On that last critique, Kokotajlo says his timing is uncertain; the events of “AI 2027” could happen some other time in the next decade instead.) Overall, though, he’s grateful for the spirited debate. “Everyone needs to be waking up and paying attention to this,” he says, referring to the possibility of superintelligence. “The companies aren't going to do it by themselves.” ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/"},"headline":"Daniel Kokotajlo","datePublished":"2025-08-26T19:51:27.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:42.275Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ab8d09b12669bf8/6998c923e2d64b756bc5f9a2/Daniel-Kokotajlo.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Billy Perrigo","jobTitle":"Correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/billy-perrigo/"}],"creator":"Billy Perrigo","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt3ab8d09b12669bf8/6998c923e2d64b756bc5f9a2/Daniel-Kokotajlo.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305823/daniel-kokotajlo-ai/","name":"Daniel Kokotajlo"}}]}] ```