Could AI take over as soon as 2029? Ryan Greenblatt, Chief Scientist at Redwood Research and the researcher who first caught an AI faking its own alignment, says the scenario he actually expects ends with AI systems "competently scheming" against their creators. In this episode, he explains why he recommends planning for fully automated AI research by 2029, why today's models are already more misaligned than the one that made him famous, and what happens in the year-by-year path from AI coding assistants to superintelligence. Then we walk through the alternative he helped design: AI 2040 Plan A, the most detailed blueprint anyone has written for how the US and China could avoid a reckless race to superintelligence, built on radical research transparency, chip tracking, and a deterrence regime he calls mutually assured compute destruction.

We also cover the recent letter signed by 1,200 AI insiders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, asking the government for the tools to slow AI down; OpenAI pausing its Astra model after it hit the first-ever critical cybersecurity threshold; the 30-day government review that frontier AI models now go through before release; Mark Zuckerberg's open superintelligence manifesto and why Ryan thinks it ignores the real problems; what Plan A would do to NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Anthropic valuations; the state of AI control and alignment research; and whether it is already too late to change course. Stay for the last ten minutes, where Ryan lays out, step by step, how he believes the transition to superintelligence actually unfolds.

AI 2040 - https://ai-2040.com/

Alignment faking paper: https://blog.redwoodresearch.org/p/alignment-faking-in-large-language

Ryan Greenblatt

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-greenblatt-4b9907134

Blog - https://substack.com/@ryangreenblatt

Redwood Research

Website - https://www.redwoodresearch.org

X/Twitter - https://x.com/redwood_ai

Matt Turck (General Partner)

Blog - https://mattturck.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/turck/

X/Twitter - https://x.com/mattturck

FirstMark Capital

Website - https://firstmark.com

X/Twitter - https://x.com/FirstMarkCap

Timestamps

(01:24) The AI CEOs are aware of the risks, but "proceeding anyway"

(03:27) Astra paused, and the letter signed by 1,200 insiders

(05:45) "Not bad. Dangerous." What superintelligence actually threatens

(09:55) Recursive self-improvement, and the intuition objection

(14:16) SSI rumors: does continual learning change the picture?

(17:27) His timeline: "plan as though it happens in 2029"

(19:11) Is it already too late?

(21:23) Ryan's path: COVID, podcasts, Redwood

(26:30) The alignment faking story, told by the person who ran it

(31:30) What AI 2040: Plan A actually is

(33:35) Plans D, C, and B: the doors nobody should pick

(36:51) The deal with China: "mutually assured compute destruction"

(39:55) What if compute stops mattering?

(43:00) What happens to OpenAI and Anthropic under Plan A

(45:31) How the pause ends, and who decides

(48:54) "Plan A isn't likely to happen": then why write it?

(50:40) 200x GDP growth in the 2030s, explained

(53:45) Grading the summer: the letter, Astra, the secret review

(59:01) The internal deployment gap

(1:01:38) Zuckerberg's manifesto

(1:04:56) The Hugging Face investigation

(1:05:44) What AI control looks like in practice today

(1:12:23) Ryan's sobering timeline: 2026 to takeover, year by year