If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
- INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares is one of 2026's most credible books, appearing on 1 of the year's most respected lists, including The Guardian, for a Consensus Score of 16 out of 100.
Appears on these lists
Our take
AI-draftedYudkowsky and Soares, longtime figures in AI-safety circles, make their most accessible case yet that building superintelligent AI with current alignment techniques would end badly for humanity, not through malice but through indifference to goals we never managed to specify. The book has split critics sharply on whether the argument is newly legible and persuasive or thin on evidence and overly reliant on thought experiments.
In the press
“tendentious and rambling, simultaneously condescending and shallow”
Adam Becker, The Atlantic“not a serious book”
Gareth Watkins, New Statesman
How the Consensus Score is calculated
Our Consensus Score is our own transparent editorial metric — not a user rating. It weighs each list by the credibility of its source, how recent the listing is, and any award status. Here is the full breakdown.
| Source | Authority | Recency | Award | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Guardian | 0.85 | 0.85 | 1.00× | 0.72 |
| Weighted sum → Score | 0.72 → 16 | |||
Similar consensus books
Because they appear on some of the same lists.
Frequently asked
What lists is If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies on?
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies appears on 1 list in our 2026 corpus, including The Guardian.
What is its Consensus Score?
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies has a Consensus Score of 16 out of 100, our transparent editorial measure of how many credible lists agree on it.