Leopold Aschenbrenner quote, Jun 4, 2024

Founder, Situational Awareness LP · Jun 4, 2024 · Essay, Situational Awareness IV: The Project

Ultimately, my main claim here is descriptive: whether we like it or not, superintelligence won’t look like an SF startup, and in some way will be primarily in the domain of national security.

Primary source

Words found on the source page on Sep 25, 2026.

More from Leopold Aschenbrenner

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Jun 4, 2024	But right now, there are perhaps a few hundred people, most of them in San Francisco and the AI labs, that have situational awareness. Through whatever peculiar forces of fate, I have found myself amongst them.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade Ahead	Source
Jun 4, 2024	By 28/29 the intelligence explosion will be underway; by 2030, we will have summoned superintelligence, in all its power and might.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness IV: The Project	Source
Jun 4, 2024	By the early 2030s, the entirety of the US arsenal (like it or not, the bedrock of global peace and security) will probably be obsolete.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness IV: The Project	Source
Jun 4, 2024	Do we really want the infrastructure for the Manhattan Project to be controlled by some capricious Middle Eastern dictatorship?Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster	Source
Jun 4, 2024	Hundreds of millions of AGIs could automate AI research, compressing a decade of algorithmic progress (5+ OOMs) into ≤1 year.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade Ahead	Source
Jun 4, 2024	I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness I: From GPT-4 to AGI	Source
Jun 4, 2024	Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness: The Decade Ahead	Source
Jun 4, 2024	The trillion-dollar, 100GW cluster alone would require ~20% of current US electricity generation in 6 years; together with large inference capacity, demand will be multiples higher.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster	Source
Jun 4, 2024	White-collar workers are paid tens of trillions of dollars in wages annually worldwide; a drop-in remote worker that automates even a fraction of white-collar/cognitive jobs (imagine, say, a truly automated AI coder) would pay for the trillion-dollar cluster.Jun 4, 2024· Essay	EssaySituational Awareness IIIa: Racing to the Trillion-Dollar Cluster	Source

Date	Quote	Context	Source
Sep 23, 2026	Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 23, 2026	The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 23, 2026	We must agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.Yoshua BengioSep 23, 2026· Keynote	KeynoteSpeech at the UN Security Council	Source
Sep 22, 2026	Even if you believe in a deal with China, and I do not, we (and others) now know competitors can catch up more quickly than we had thought, at least if they think they have a chance of winning.Tyler CowenSep 22, 2026· Post	PostBanning self-recursive improvement in AI models?	Source
Sep 22, 2026	If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute.Tyler CowenSep 22, 2026· Post	PostBanning self-recursive improvement in AI models?	Source
Sep 22, 2026	AI must not be placed in the hands of children without first being tested, evaluated, and therefore authorized.Emmanuel MacronSep 22, 2026· Statement	StatementLaunch of the roadmap of the Coalition for Children's Rights and Protection in the Age of AI	Source

About this quote

Said by: Leopold Aschenbrenner, Founder, Situational Awareness LP
Where: Situational Awareness IV: The Project
Topics: Superintelligence, Regulation
Company: Situational Awareness
Source: situational-awareness.ai/the-project/

A quote is one moment, not the whole argument. Read it in context at the source.

Sources: the primary source linked on each quote, checked weekly. A quote is one moment; read the source. Logos via logo.dev; trademarks belong to their owners.

More from Leopold Aschenbrenner

On the same topics

New quotes by email