Ex-Google Engineer Nate Soares Stops Saving for Retirement Over AI Risks

Why Nate Soares Stopped Saving for Retirement

One prominent figure in artificial intelligence safety has chosen to halt all retirement savings. nate soares, a former Google engineer who now leads the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, revealed that he has not added money to his 401(k) account in roughly ten years because he expects advanced technology to eliminate humanity within a decade.

Speaking on a podcast hosted by The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson, Soares explained his bleak outlook. When asked if he believed there was more than a fifty percent chance that humans will not survive the next ten years, Soares replied that the timeline appears shorter than a decade from his perspective.

The Risks of Advanced Artificial Intelligence

Soares left Google in 2014 to join MIRI, a nonprofit based in Berkeley dedicated to studying how to keep advanced systems behaving safely. Alongside MIRI cofounder Eliezer Yudkowsky, Soares detailed these concerns in their 2025 book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

The text argues that superintelligent software built using current methods will develop unintended goals and inevitably end human life. While the book features a fictional scenario involving a lab escape and a gradual virus release, Soares noted on the podcast that a real-life rogue system would likely move much faster through an intelligence explosion.

Comparing Rogue AI to Nuclear Weapons

Addressing how nations should respond, Soares argued that a rogue superintelligence is more hazardous than nuclear weapons because nuclear devices cannot escape or make themselves more explosive. He suggested that countries should treat dangerous development projects with the same severity applied to nuclear proliferation, drawing parallels to how nations handle uranium enrichment sites.

Despite his warnings, Soares emphasizes that he is not focused on job displacement. As he summarized during the discussion, he is not worried about an employment apocalypse, but rather an outcome where technology causes total human extinction.

Sources: Fortune, Business Insider, Tech Xplore.