Kelsey Piper

AI position

Focused on x-risk

Longtime Future Perfect (Vox) writer who takes catastrophic AI risk seriously and broke the OpenAI exit-agreement equity story; now at The Argument, also writes for Asterisk.

Sheet category (Jul 15, 2026 snapshot): Frontier safety / catastrophic risk

Hand-added; not part of the ranked 300 snapshot.

Why influential

One of very few journalists trusted by both the safety community and mainstream outlets; her scoops move lab-governance debates.

Who pays attention

AI safety community, EA-adjacent policy staff, tech accountability readers

AI-world contactsunvetted

• Eliezer Yudkowsky — Co-founder, MIRI

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Sep 1, 2025 — 'AI will kill everyone' is not an argument. It's a worldview. — Compares Yudkowsky and Soares's 'superintelligence worldview' with AI normalism and an accumulative-risk position. [Valence re-judged under seriousness axis: Piper substantively engages the argument's structure and locates where genuine disagreement lies, rather than mocking it.]

• Paul Christiano — Head of Safety, US AI Safety Institute

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jun 1, 2023 — A Field Guide to AI Safety — Field guide to the safety landscape; identifies Christiano as ARC head and RLHF co-developer, no fresh quotes. Hand-added after a human reader flagged the scan miss.
  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Mar 29, 2023 — How to test what an AI model can — and shouldn't — do — Explains ARC's GPT-4 evaluations and Christiano's founding role.