If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Article
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a recurring book in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between July 01, 2025 and January 13, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “have a book on AI coming out in September, catchily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”; “Eliezer Yudkowsky’s upcoming AI book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”; “their upcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (release date September 16)“. It most often appears alongside OpenAI, Cremieux, Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Metadata
- Category: Books
- Mention count: 5
- Issue count: 5
- First seen: July 01, 2025
- Last seen: January 13, 2026
Appears In
- Links For July 2025
- Open Thread 396
- Book Review: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- Links For October 2025
- SOTA On Bay Area House Party
Related Pages
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- OpenAI (4 shared issues)
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- Cremieux (3 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (3 shared issues)
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- FDA (3 shared issues)
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- ACX (2 shared issues)
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- Anthropic (2 shared issues)
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- Cambodia (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- India (2 shared issues)
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- Italy (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
28: Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares have a book on AI coming out in September, catchily titled If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. Nobody is very surprised that they wrote this book, but I’m a little surprised at the endorsements they managed to collect, including Stephen Fry, Ben Bernanke, and a former undersecretary of Homeland Security. As always, if you support the cause, pre-orders can be especially helpful in creating buzz and catching booksellers’ interest.
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, pre-orders
A volunteer to do a large amount of work as the main evaluator for our policy team, which has about ~20 grants on their shortlist. These range from progress studies PACs, to voter education platforms, to free speech advocacy orgs. An ideal candidate would know enough about the policy landscape to have good opinions on which of these things will work and be cost-effective. Each grant would require a few minutes to a few hours of your time (your choice, depending on how obvious you think the decision is) over the next three weeks. I can explain more details over email if you’re interested. Please volunteer using this form, if we have too many volunteers then I may not contact everyone who applies, sorry. 6: The team behind Eliezer Yudkowsky's upcoming AI book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, asks me to let interested readers know a few related announcements: The book is coming out September 16 and can be pre-ordered here.
Yudkowsky and his co-author, MIRI president Nate Soares, have reached new heights of unambivalence with their upcoming book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (release date September 16, currently available for preorder).
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is available here for pre-order, and will be released on September 16. Liron Shapira is hosting an online launch party; see here for more.
Inline links: available here for pre-order, here
38: Eliezer and Nate’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is now out and is an NYT bestseller. Authors’ Atlantic article here (paywalled). Online resources/FAQ/answers to objections here. My review here. Peter Wildeford’s review here. Mostly negative Asterisk review here, criticisms/arguments about the Asterisk review here, Eliezer’s response to this line of criticism here (X). I thought all the reviews, positive and negative, had something useful to say - except the NYT review, which was remarkably bad (Steven Adler points out that it accuses the book of failing to define the term “superintelligence”, but it very explicitly does that on page 4). I read Literary Substack sometimes, and I am so confused - it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, an NYT bestseller, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (X), was remarkably bad
If anyone asks, you think it deserves a medium score. There’s alcohol, but it’s bottles of rubbing alcohol with NOT FOR DRINKING written all over them. There’s music, but it’s the Star Spangled Banner, again and again, on repeat. You’re not sure whether the copies of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies strewn about the room are some kind of subversive decorative theme, or just came along with the house. At least there are people. Lots of people, actually. You’ve never seen so many people at one of these before. It takes only a few seconds to spot someone you know.