Ex-Google engineer Nate Soares hasn’t added to his 401(k) in a decade because he’s an ‘AI kills all humans guy’

Nate Soares, a former Google engineer and current president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), has not contributed to his 401(k) for about a decade. He explained on The Most Interesting Thing in AI podcast that he lives with the belief that AI will likely kill everyone before we even reach retirement age. Soares left Google in 2014 to join MIRI, where he has been studying how to make advanced AI behave as intended.

In the 2025 book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, Soares and MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky argue that a superintelligent AI built with current methods would develop unintended goals and almost certainly result in human extinction. Soares likened his confidence in this scenario to playing chess against Magnus Carlsen, and said he is doing everything he can to prevent it.

He compared the potential AI threat to a world where people are playing tennis, instead of hiding under desks. Soares advises nations to treat a rogue superintelligent AI with the same seriousness as nuclear weapons.