- Published: 30 September 2025
- ISBN: 9781847928931
- Imprint: Bodley Head
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 304
- RRP: $36.99
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
The Case Against Superintelligent AI

















- Published: 30 September 2025
- ISBN: 9781847928931
- Imprint: Bodley Head
- Format: Trade Paperback
- Pages: 304
- RRP: $36.99
The most important book I’ve read for years: I want to bring it to every political and corporate leader in the world and stand over them until they’ve read it. Yudkowsky and Soares, who have studied AI and its possible trajectories for decades, sound a loud trumpet call to humanity to awaken us as we sleepwalk into disaster. Their brilliant gift for analogy, metaphor and parable clarifies for the general reader the tangled complexities of AI engineering, cognition and neuroscience better than any book on the subject I’ve ever read, and I’ve waded through scores of them. We really must rub our eyes and wake the fuck up!
Stephen Fry
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies may prove to be the most important book of our time. Yudkowsky and Soares believe we are nowhere near ready to make the transition to superintelligence safely, leaving us on the fast track to extinction. Through the use of parables and crystal-clear explainers, they convey their reasoning, in an urgent plea for us to save ourselves while we still can
Tim Urban, co-founder of Wait But Why
The best no-nonsense, simple explanation of the AI risk problem I've ever read
Yishan Wong, former CEO of Reddit
Soares and Yudkowsky lay out, in plain and easy-to-follow terms, why our current path toward ever-more-powerful AIs is extremely dangerous
Emmett Shear, former interim CEO of OpenAI
This captivating page-turner, from two of today's clearest thinkers, reveals that the competition to build smarter-than-human machines isn't an arms race but a suicide race, fuelled by wishful thinking
Max Tegmark, author of Life 3.0
An eloquent and urgent plea for us to step back from the brink of self-annihilation
Fiona Hill, Defence Advisor to UK government
Everyone should read this book. I’m 70% confident that you – yes, you reading this right now – will one day grudgingly admit that we all should have listened to Yudkowsky and Soares when we still had the chance
Daniel Kokotajlo, OpenAI whistleblower and lead author, AI 2027