Ihor Kendiukhov

There's a list of bullet points here.

A government explicitly forcing an AGI lab to discard safety techniques or policies.

not in the sense of a subtle regulatory pressure, but in the direct sense of a political appointee or a ministry calling up a lab and saying your safety filtering is hurting our industrial competitiveness, turn it off or your alignment testing is slowing deployment, we need this system operational by Q3.

Resourceful individuals openly collaborating with visibly misaligned AIs against humanity.

Not in the sense of a secret conspiracy but in the sense of people who genuinely believe that the AI's goals are better than humanity's, or who simply find it personally advantageous, and who are operating more or less in the open.

AGI lab technical secrets being leaked to non-state actors who lack any safety culture whatsoever.

Early warnings in the form of manipulation, autonomous resource acquisition, or even deaths being ignored or significantly downplayed.

This is just a straightforward extrapolation of the current pattern.

Someone raises an alarm, the alarm gets reframed as alarmism or as an HR issue or as a reputational threat.

AI alignment techniques not deployed because they induce 2% cost growth.

all kinds of unilateral, volunteer, and eager assistance and support for misaligned AIs from some humans.

The scenario in which an AI needs to secretly recruit human allies through manipulation is, I suspect, far less likely than the scenario in which humans line up to help because they find it exciting, or ideologically compelling, or simply profitable.

Politicians making random bureaucratic decisions that do not necessarily lead to doom but make it harder to do good things with AI or protect against misaligned AIs.

AI-generated biohazards

Looks like it is going to happen rather sooner than later.

AGI Labs believing in semi-indefinite scalable oversight, or acting as if they believe in it.

Looks consistent with what people who left corporate alignment teams say.

I do agree that this kind of work looks a bit unserious, but that is precisely why I am pointing at this.

It would be a shame, and a historically very recognizable kind of shame, if this threat model turned out to be real and no one had worked on it because it seemed ridiculous.

Or, to frame it more playfully, imagine a timeline like the one in The Survival Without Dignity, where humanity lurches through the AI transition via a series of absurd compromises, implausible cultural shifts, and situations that no serious forecaster would have put in their model because they would have seemed too silly.