Will AI take power — or will humans use it to take power first? With Katja Grace and Tom Davidson

In our first-ever debate, we asked two leading AI risk researchers which catastrophe we should fear most: misaligned AI seizing control from humans, or a small group of humans using AI to seize power. We got very different answers. But when the conversation turned to what to actually do, they agreed on a surprising amount.

Katja Grace — one of the founders of AI Impacts, known for some of the world’s largest surveys of machine learning researchers, and one of TIME‘s 100 most influential people in AI in 2024 — argues AI takeover is both likelier and worse.

Tom Davidson — senior research fellow at Forethought and author of leading work on AI-enabled coups — thinks human power grabs are a comparable risk that deserves far more attention, not least because the people leading countries and top AI companies “are often people who have been willing to seek power.”

Yet both land on slowing down. As Katja puts it, “If you make a bunch of creatures that can overpower you and outwit you in every way and put them out in the world, you’re going to run into trouble one way or another.” Tom calls pausing “a pretty robustly good thing to do.”

But Tom warns that a badly designed pause could hand one person the power to decide which AI companies get to build what. Picture a president who approves or blocks new models case by case, and waves through the one model that’s helpful only to them. So he wants pause advocates to “properly red-team the plan for pausing it” — for example, by making deployment depend on third-party auditors the president can’t fire. Katja points out this cuts both ways: an executive with that much power could itself be manipulated by a misaligned AI.

Host Zershaaneh Qureshi also presses them on where their disagreements still bite at the end of the conversation, and what would change their minds.

Learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/katja-v-tom

This episode was recorded on August 28, 2026.

Chapters:

• Our first debate! Introducing Katja and Tom (00:00:00)
• Which is scarier: misaligned AIs or human power grabs? (00:05:09)
• How AI timelines influence could shift the balance of risk (00:14:30)
• How likely is misaligned AI in the first place? (00:17:36)
• How likely are human power grabs? (00:19:39)
• Which would be worse: a human dictator or AI takeover? (00:28:57)
• Could we reverse a takeover? (00:42:39)
• We know less about what AI rule would look like (00:46:35)
• How to pause AI without enabling coups (00:50:31)
• Centralising AI development: safer or scarier? (01:04:44)
• Nobody really ‘wins’ a US–China AI race (01:08:59)
• Where Tom and Katja most agreed with each other (01:13:52)
• What we should actually do (01:17:21)
• What evidence would change their minds? (01:22:36)
• Zershaaneh’s outro (01:25:49)

Our production team includes:

• Video editors: Josh Alward, Dominic Armstrong, Jasper Luithlen, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
• Producers: Elizabeth Cox and Nick Stockton
• Coordination and support: Katy Moore and Lou Moran