Expert takes Aug 10, 2026

Geoffrey Irving (chief scientist, UK AISI, previously at DeepMind and OpenAI), August 7, 2026: "I don't think it is rational for anyone to be doing capabilities research at a frontier lab right now."

He goes on: "We are not in a Prisoners Dilemma: the situation is very dangerous, and if one person or lab stops it makes it easier and more peer-compatible for other people or labs to stop" (the post).

In plain terms: a prisoner's dilemma presumes that unilateral withdrawal gets punished, and the most common defense of the AI race is exactly that — if I don't do it someone else will, and stopping only hands the advantage to someone less careful. Irving argues the premise is inverted: one party stopping lowers the social cost for everyone else to stop, which makes this a coordination game. The same day, Yo Shavit, a serving policy researcher at OpenAI, said he cannot stop thinking about a weird fact: the current AI race is between two companies less than two miles apart — "Everyone could just meet at the Presidio tomorrow and just like… figure it out" (the post).

Which of our past judgments this touches: the safety arguments we hold mostly contest how large the risk is and what should be regulated, whereas these two attack the premise of the game itself — and one of them works at one of the companies in question, which is the first time since we started tracking this thread. ⚠️ Both are normative claims with zero evidence attached, and neither may be read as a resignation or as internal dissent.