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2026-06-18

I am looking for a cofounder to cyberattack the US govt and US AI companies, and leak information about them

O. Introduction

Summary - TO DO

• Catchy tagline: "Anti-ASI leaks" ???
• Four-word summary of this plan: Eliezer Yudkowsky x Julian Assange
• Three-sentence summary of this plan: I want an anti-ASI political leader in the US to oppose the intelligence agencies and politicians and lobby groups and media houses that are pro-AI, and obtain enough political power to shut down the US AI companies. I want to help this leader by leaking information of all these enemies who are pro-AI. I want to minimise unnecessary harm to people, but beyond this I am not very choosy about the legality or morality of how we make this happen.
• Paragraph-long summary of this plan: ??? (ask gpt-5.5, sorry)

Table of Contents

• O. Introduction
  • Summary
  • Table of Contents (recursive, lol)
  • If you want to work with me
  • Why this writeup?
  • Disclaimers
  • Disclaimer - Mission statements are fake anyway
• I. My worldview
  • My views on superintelligence
  • My views on the US intelligence community being unaccountable
  • My views on privacy/transparency/surveillance and "zero privacy" world
  • My views on capitalism and democracy
  • My views on the three reference classes of true ambition
  • My views on differential technological progress
  • My views on how people will look at us, not our work
• II. About the stakes, and my motivation
  • The stakes
  • Motivation/Morale of our group. How do we relate to the stakes?
• III. What is out of scope?
  • Sabotage is not our primary goal, leaking information is
  • Persuasion is not our primary goal
  • Assassinations is not our goal
• IV. About key decisions we have to make, and associated morality
  • About morality in theory versus practice
  • About receiving feedback, including moral feedback
  • About choice of attack targets, and morality
  • About choice of redaction policy, and morality
  • About choice of methods, and morality
  • De-escalation
  • My personal history with morality
• V. About reputation, allies, funding, etc
  • About trust and reputation
  • About allies and funding
  • About PR and backfire effects
• VI. About our capabilities
  • About methods
  • Abour our own opsec
  • Location
    • My current considerations on choice of location
  • Why I think we can win
  • Examples of cyberhackers leaking information for political reasons
• VII. Target audience - cofounder and feedback
  • Worldview/morality/motivation of the ideal people I wanna work with
  • Competencies of the ideal people I wanna work with
  • Risks involved in working with me

If you want to work with me

• Contact me
  • My Signal username: samueldashadrach.02
  • See also: Contact me
• Refer me to someone
  • If you can refer me to a potential cofounder, I can pay you $1000 after 1 year of working together with this person.
  • See also: I can pay you if you find me a cofounder
• Risks to contacting me
  • The risks to you are not that high if we only have a call or two. However the risks to you are in fact quite high if we end up working together full-time. Scroll to bottom of the document for more on this.
• Why contact me
  • Your best option is probably actually scheduling a call with me and asking me more, as opposed to trying to find all the answers to your questions in this document. It might be faster.
  • In-person / video call is good for building trust. I have lot of first-hand experience telling me so.

Why this writeup?

• Primary reason: I am looking for a cofounder.
• Secondary reason: My writings on this topic are sprawling all over the place, and I wanted to summarise all my learnings coherently in a way that doesn't make me look like this:

• I have read too much and have too much tacit knowledge, and I want atleast some of it to be in a written form that is easy to understand.

Special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along a path you cannot explain anymore. - Brian Herbert, Dune

(credits to Gwern for this quote, Gwern obviously does not endorse this project though)

Disclaimers

• Contains politically sensitive info
• Incomplete. This document is still Incomplete. I still make updates to this document sometimes.
• I have poured many hours into this document so I can no longer call it a "quick note." However it is still evolving a lot, so it is not guaranteed to be in its final form yet. Please don't assume that any opinions here are my final opinions on any of these topics.
• This document is in a fairly EA/LW-inspired style, with its neurotic focus on morality and theory of change and evidence backing each potential crux and so on. It is possible if you are from a different subculture, such as from cybersecurity (either white hat or black hat), you will appreciate a different sort of document.
• For instance, this document does not contain a lot of technical details on any particular type of attack, nor does it contain a plan for how to raise funding. Those details are in different documents.
• Notes to myself shifted to separate document

Disclaimer - Mission statements are fake anyway

Solo versus team

• So far I have been operating independently so I have been the sole person deciding everything.
• If we work together as cofounders, we will have to take decisions together, instead of me deciding everything unilaterally.

Why mission statements are fake

• Org culture is ultimately decided by how its core members actually think and behave, not by words on some mission statement.
• Morality must be embodied in practice, often backed by experiences with actual suffering and love and so on. Overly theoretical notions of morality will crumble in the face of true adversity.
• Similarly, a lot of operational / strategic stuff here could be wrong due to lack of knowledge on my part, and I might find out in the upcoming months as I make more contact with reality on all of that.

I think it is good to write mission statements even if they are fake. You can slam your bad plan against reality until it hands you a better plan, but how will you do that if you don't have a bad plan to begin with.

I. My worldview

My views on superintelligence

Creation of artificial superintelligence is likely the most important event of ~10,000 years of human history.

• It is more important than Industrial Revolution / Newton / French revolution / printing press.
• It is more important than invention of nuclear weapons, as an ASI will accelerate creation of weapons more dangerous than nukes.
• It is definitely more important than the creation of the internet and all silicon valley startups.
• If the takeoff is fast enough, creation of superintelligence may be the most important event in the ~14 billion year history of the universe. It could end up more important than the evolutionary history of all other lifeforms on Earth, and to the best of our current knowledge, Earth is the only place in the universe with intelligent life.

My views on timelines and p(doom)

• I currently think there's 25% probability of ASI by 2030 and maybe 40% probability of ASI by 2035, unless there is a successful mass movement in the US to stop this.
• Conditional on ASI being built, I think atleast 33% chance literally everyone on Earth dies due to superintelligence taking over, atleast 33% chance a handful of people use superintelligence to create permanent global dictatorship, and 33% includes all other outcomes (ASI takeover but no extinction, ASI builds utopia, some weird third thing).
  • Update - My P(doom, conditional on ASI being built) is now much higher than 33%, I might post more about it later but it doesn't seem all that decision-relevant, I will probably work on supporting an AI pause either way.
• I think a mildly superhuman but not vastly superhuman AI can be successfully kept in control, and this is what can be used to create permanent dictatorship. They could use hyperpersuasion to take over populations or overthrow governments, they could use automated military to takeover govts via hard physical force, or similar.
• I think the default outcome, unless there is a mass movement against it, is a US-China arms race for total world dominance. Whichever small group wins takes control of the world forever. Or they may lose control of the ASI during the arms race itself. Or afterwards.

Can we work together if we disagree on the above?

• If you consider all the above claims crazy, you need a different introduction to the topic than this document. And no, we can't work together unless you change your mind about it.
• If your timeline and p(doom) numbers are somewhat different from me, we can probably still work together. If they are extremely different, it is possible this is a dealbreaker. Happy to discuss to figure it out.
• It is important to me that this is not just an intellectual game, and you have atleast somewhat attempted to emotionally internalise what this means. Human extinction means a hundred world wars or a thousand holocausts all at once.

My views on the US intelligence community being unaccountable

I think the US intelligence community has had absolute unaccountable power to take key decisions of the US govt for the last 80 years (since world war 2), and I don't see this changing by default.

• Key decisions they unilaterally take include decisions on sanctions (on equipment, reagents, etc) to stay at the frontier on any technological race in last 80 years. Another key decision they unilaterally take includes decisions to start wars.
• They are not accountable to the Congress / Senate, or to the Supreme Court, or to any regulatory body or similar, when it comes to these key decisions.
• Heads of US intelligence already have active relationships with the heads of all major US AI companies. They are one of the primary reasons the US AI companies will remain unaccountable to the US public, unless something big changes.
• I think social media influencers are most accountable to the public. Politicians and billionaires are less unaccountable than them. Heads of intelligence are the least accountable to the public. There are structural reasons why this unaccountability exists.
• Persuading heads of US intelligence community to stop the race towards ASI is too hard, they are likely to accelerate towards ASI even if they have some understanding of the risks.

I have a fairly strong belief in this direction. Why?

• I have studied every US govt whistleblower leaking classified info in the past 50 years as part of the work I published.
• I have read atleast a couple books about who actually took the decisions during the Manhattan project.
• I have read a bit about US cold war history, and a bit on more recent wars started by the US, to see who took the decisions.
• I have also looked at some of the journalists, politicians and mass protest movements in the US trying to (unsuccessfully) hold the US intelligence community more accountable, in more recent times.
• I have read the blogs of almost every famous cypherpunk activist, and have carefully tracked who got arrested versus not, and why.
• I have gone through public statements of many recent heads of US intelligence on topics including AI, cybersecurity, social media, surveillance, drone warfare, and so on.

Getting 51% of US public to vote for an AI pause and consider it among their top-3 political issues - this is the easier part of the problem. Getting this public will actually implemented in the govt is harder than getting the public will IMO.

Why do I believe this?

• I have done surveys and multiple other people are doing surveys. We are already not that far away from crossing the 51% threshold.
• Just go pick randomly selected forums or youtube comment sections.
• Just go to streets in different cities and localities, and talk to enough people. (I have done a little bit of this, although I would like more people to do more of it.)

This is why I care about public accountability so much.

• I am not someone with pro-democracy as an axiom of my belief system. I am pro-democracy generally, however, my belief in being anti-ASI is stronger than my belief in being pro-democracy.
• The public is a lot easier to persuade to be anti-ASI, than people running US intelligence, or major politicians and billionaires.
• Therefore I want all these leaders to be accountable to the public.

My views on privacy/transparency/surveillance and "zero privacy" world

We are not building a zero privacy world

• Disclaimer - If you have no idea what I'm talking about in this section, this is fine. I can explain it to you later.
• I have often wondered what would happen if we could build a world with zero privacy for everyone, including both leaders and the public. Imagine everyone's life being livestreamed 24x7x365. Would it be a good world? Would it be better than our current world? Can we actually build this in practice, by making cyberattacks more effective than cyberdefence?
• However, I now think it'll take longer than 5 years to work out all the moral complications or get informed consent from enough people, such that I would feel okay implementing this. Also, these ideas don't seem essential to enforcing an AI pause, atleast as of now.
• It is possible that the offence-defence balance of cybersecurity shifts such that, in the next 5 years, we end up in a world with zero privacy for everyone (both leaders and the public), regardless of anything I do. However, for reasons of my own self-esteem, I would not like to be the one who personally cyberattacks and leaks the entire world's secrets.
• After a few years, once the ASI threat is dealt with, we might break apart and go our separate ways. Then I can independently contemplate at a slower pace whether I want to work on any of the zero privacy stuff or not.
• The original galaxy brain plan which I had, but am no longer working on, was the following:
  • Shift the offence-defence balance of cybersecurity such that offence wins and defence loses. Distribute the zero days to everyone on Earth who wants them. Create international and national hacker courts that adjudicate lawful and unlawful uses of these zero days.
  • Analogy 1 - Invent and distribute gunpowder to everyone, thus creating a Wild West scenario. Then create courts that adjudicate lawful and unlawful uses of guns.
  • Analogy 2 - Aaron Swartz says Harvey Dent from the Batman represents violent but ultimately fair solutions to unjust political solution. It is true that having an international hacker court appeals to me more from a fairness point of view, than one hacker group arbitrarily deciding who to target and what to leak.
  • Some upsides could be that all our dual use weapons (like ASI or bioweapons) would end up under public oversight, and that people would understand each other's experience better, because everyone has much reduced or eventually no privacy.
  • Some downsides could include a fairly violent transition period (including multiple wars and genocides), and the naive way of doing this could empower majorities at the expense of individuals, families, minority groups, etc. It will probably create more direct democracy instead of a republic, basically.
  • Also, I don't fully understand why many people want their experiences surrounding sex/nudity, family/friend/close relation conflicts, death, etc to be private, so it is possible I am missing more downsides here.

My views on the three reference classes of true ambition

I have broadly looked at the decision-making frameworks of three classes of people, to figure out how to make decisions myself. I have read many books on this.

• Self-made Silicon Valley billionaires - examples: Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham, Charlie Munger, Vitalik Buterin, Peter Thiel, Marc Andressen, etc
• Self-made politicians - examples: Jawaharlal Nehru, MK Gandhi, Lee Kuan Yew, Otto van Bismarck (as covered by Dominic Cummings), the Prince by Machievelli, stoicism by Marcus Aurellius, etc
• Software developers turned activists - examples: Richard Stallman, Aaron Swartz, Julian Assange, Timothy May, Ross Ulbricht, Alexandra Elbakyan, Satoshi Nakomoto, etc

Self-made billionaire's heuristics only work if capitalism continues.

• A lot of what is preached by the first set of people is a time-tested set of heuristics. However, a lot of these heuristics only make sense to me if capitalism continues, and there exist systems (such as democratically enforced laws) that can mitigate or absorb the downsides of capitalism.
• I think an ASI will centralise power so radically that none of this even makes sense for a post-ASI future.
  • 100% of humanity will have zero value in the market, be it their manual or cognitive labour.
  • Absolute mind control might become possible. Hyperpersuasion may become possible. We might literally be able to upload people into computers and edit their minds with absolute authoritarianism.
  • Automated militaries may become possible.
• In short, I stick to my original position that the default outcomes of ASI are human extinction or permanent dictatorship.
• I think it is lowkey morally bad to start an ASI company and try to crown yourself as the permanent global dictator. I am not interested in trying to become this person.
  • I can imagine trying to crown myself dictator if there was an actual shot at success.
  • However I think running an ASI company is reckless even from a purely self-interested point of view. The probability that someone else will win the race is greater than the probability you win. The probability that one of you cause human extinction is comparable if not greater than the probability any of you win. If you lose the race, I am not optimistic you will get a seat on the coalition that wins. ASI radically centralises power.

Self-made politician's heuristics are not for me.

• I tried running a social media channel, I tried doing protests, I have tried convincing people of almost every demographic about ASI risk.
• I dislike talking to most people. This drains my energy. I don't think I can become exceptionally good at something unless I do hit-and-trail hundreds of times over a period of a few years, and I can't do hit-and-trial hundreds of times if I hate the process this much.
• Hence I am not cut out for politics, and mass public persuasion is not for me.
• I still think it is very important that some people play this role. The most impactful thing you can do for ASI risk IMO is still to run social media channels and run for politics.

Software developers turned activists seems like the closest reference class for my plan

• I think the only people who have successfully fought intelligence community and had successes have used this idea of "geopolitical arbitrage".
• Namely, if you want to break laws of country A, go host your servers in country B, and let citizens of country A access it. Because completely firewalling your internet from the rest of the world is very challenging both in terms of engineering and economics, this tends to work
• Examples - breaking national security law (Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Securedrop, Tor, Freedom of the Press Foundation), or copyright law (Bittorrent, libgen, napster, anna's archive, Aaron Swartz leaking PACER) or financial law on taxes or capital controls (Satoshi, Vitalik, Zooko Wilkox, Roman Storm) or censorship law (some indian youtubers live outside india on purpose, won't name names) or drug law (Ross Ulbricht)
• Many of these people had libertarian intuitions for breaking the law - such as Ross Ulbricht or Satoshi. Some had more progressive leaning - such as Aaron Swartz. Some were just against the US intelligence in particular - such as Snowden or Assange.
• I've realised my ideology doesn't completely match any of these people. I want to break laws to stop ASI. This is more important to me than having any political position on war or surveillance or drug regulation or taxation or copyright or any other topic.

My views on democracy and capitalism - TO DO

Note

• This section is still significantly incomplete. I still haven't 100% made up my mind on this topic.

copy-pasting another incomplete writeup on democracy here

• I do not have infinite belief in democracy or capitalism
• My belief in being anti-ASI is stronger than my beliefs in being either pro-democracy and pro-capitalism. If I have to sacrifice democracy or capitalism in order to stop ASI, I'd be willing to go pretty far to make that happen.
• For example, it is possible that the anti-ASI political movement unites under a leader who later turns the US into a dictatorship. It is possible that the mob that represents that anti-ASI political movement causes breakdown of law and order in the US, and many people get killed as a result.
• To a significant extent, I am genuinely okay with these downsides as long as ASI is stopped. And even if I am not okay with these downsides, it is not our job to deal with all these downsides. We have to stay limited to our goal of leaking information, and trust that those more directly involved with politics do a good job on their end.
• Another major way we could end up making the problem worse is by encouraging more political violence, and more people to also violate the norms of democracy and capitalism. However, I am also genuinely okay with this too. (TO DO - Write more here.)

copy-pasting another incomplete writeup on democracy here

• As Vitalik Buterin's article on Balance of Power puts it, three competing forces in the world are Big Mob, Big Government and Big Business. I want to empower Big Mob, and disempower Big Business and Big Government.
• I am aware there are downsides to empowering mobs to this degree. I accept these downsides. More on that discussed in the section "public persuasion is not our org's primary goal"

copy-pasting another incomplete writeup on democracy here

• "The Truth will endure"
• I am not a very strong believer in democracy because see above, most people have invested their entire life into a strategy that deliberately ensures they avoid contact with the Truth on most topics. As a result, taking a majority vote gives you a very dumb result on many topics that matter.
• That being said, one thing I do like about our current world is that it often allows you to speak the Truth even if everyone else hates you for it. I do believe that over the very long run (this could be multiple decades or even a century), the Truth does tend to come out, and especially so in a democratic setup. In the short run (few years or shorter), ofcourse people are stupid and politicians are malevolent and your society reacts to the truth in all sorts of stupid ways.
• (Why does the world allow you to speak the Truth nowadays but not in the past, is a very long discussion best had elsewhere. Short version is technologies like guns, nuclear weapons, printing press and then cheap hard disks and microprocessors, and an internet that crosses nuclear-armed borders, along with social technologies like gun rights, free speech, etc that defend the use of these technologies by individuals.)
• A major motivation for my work is that after I'm dead, I want people to know the full chain of events of what the hell just happened here. Who was trying to build ASI, what did their personal and professional lives look like, what were their ideology and incentives, and likewise who tried to stop ASI, what did their personal and professional lives look like, what were their ideology and incentives, and so on.
• This is a major motivation for why I want to leak information, and also for why I have a "zero privacy world" as one of my North Stars for which direction to move society towards.
• I have some hope that future generations will be able to use all this information to design a better society for themselves.

copy-pasting another incomplete writeup on democracy here

• If you're pro-capitalism or pro-democracy because you've just mindlessly copied these beliefs from someone else, I don't care much for your beliefs. I want to work with someone who actually groks why political systems must try to constrain self-interested actors, instead of trying to empower benevolent altruistic actors (or worse, mindlessly assume that benevolent altruistic actors will get power within the system).
• Ideally you can put yourself in the shoes of a self-interested actor, atleast in thought, if not in practice. Ideally you have first-hand experience or have atleast read stories of self-interested actors gaming systems that assume too much altruism from its people.
• I personally like Thomas Sowell's writings here, but again, the important thing is practice, not theory.
• In general, I consider it an almost hopeless endeavour to try and convince all people to follow your worldview or morality or actions. You can try to convince some people, but you can never convince all of them. You have to assume that there will always be violent self-interested power-seeking people, and design your key institutions to constrain the behaviour of such people. If you are not self-interested yourself, there is a good chance you lack imagination as to how such people can game any system you try to build.
• TO DO - write more about Sowell's writings here.

My views on differential technological progress - TO DO

Note

• This section is incomplete

My views on differential technological progress

• Enforcing differential technological progress is hard. Either you need to trust some centralised institution to enforce it and remain benevolent. Or you need the public to actually understand differential technological progress and then enforce it via democratic institutions.
• Many Silicon Valley billionaires, including Balaji Srinivasan, Peter Thiel, etc don't actually believe differential technological progress is possible. They seem to assume that if you allow the public to decide on such a topic, you will eventually see a broad slowdown of tech progress and more authoritarianism.
• TO DO

My views on high-trust versus low-trust society

• TO DO

My views on how people will look at us, not our work - TO DO

Note

• This section is incomplete

Main

• The primary consequence I am hoping for is to leak info about pro-ASI people and make them unpopular.
• However, this plan will also change people's minds because of how they look at us, not just how they look at the pro-ASI people building ASI.
• For example, if they realise we could get away with this (geopolitical arbitrarge, political violence, hacking, etc), then more of them might be inspired to do the same.
• Also, the fact that we have any impact whatsoever, could inspire more people to do similar things. "You Can Just Do Things" is a message that still hasn't percolated in the public, most people are genuinely pessimistic about theit ability to affect any large society-scale change.

II. About the stakes, and my motivation

The stakes

Success

• If we succeed at leaking info, we will increase chances that we won't be murdered or enslaved by 2030.
• If we succeed at leaking info, we will increase chances that our loved ones won't be murdered or enslaved by 2030.
• If we succeed at leaking info, we increase chances that billions of other people won't be murdered by enslaved by 2030.
• If the whole AI pause political movement succeeds, and we survive this, our names will go in the history books.

Failure

• Just invert everything above - There's a significant chance I will die. Or maybe be enslaved. My loved ones will die or be enslaved. Billions of people will die or be enslaved.

Motivation/Morale of our group. How do we relate to the stakes? - TO DO

Motivation is not the same as stakes, or theory of change

• There is a set of facts on what the stakes actually are. There is a set of facts on what our theory of change actually is.
• However, what motivates me is not the same thing as what the stakes or the theory of change is.
• We are attempting something difficult, adversarial and high-stakes. Hence managing morale/motivation will be one of our primary jobs as cofounders.

If you are considering working with me, I recommend writing your own list of things that motivate you. Whether you show it to me or the public is your choice.

Here's a list of things that motivate me the most as of 2026-04. (This stuff does change a bit with time.)

• "Kill or be killed"
  • If I am even willing to kill friends or family to save my own life (I have experiences I can't share here), I am definitely willing to kill a bunch of strangers to save my own life.
    • (2026-06-06 Minor update) I thought I should clarify this point a bit more, because I can imagine this being confusing for some readers. I am quite loyal to a handful of people I care about. If I promise to be there for people in a time of need, I tend to keep my promises. I am here specifically talking about an edge case scenario where I quite literally have to either kill or be killed, and there is no third option where everyone survives. In this edge case scenario, I would rather kill, than be killed.
  • The reason I am not taking a razor and personally slitting the throats of those working at the AI companies is that this won't solve the problem of ASI risk. The reason is not that I have some moral inhibitions in doing this.
  • Leaking these people's information sounds like a plan that is atleast somewhat violent, yet could actually make a difference beyond just being performative on social media. In my eyes, I'd rather be responsible for the social media headline "Man leaks proof Altman blackmailed senators" than the headline "Man throws Molotov cocktail on Altman's house." (Although, to be clear I am not against either of these, and I have some respect for the person who threw the cocktail and voluntarily went to prison as a result.)
• I remind myself of death often
  • I have made some preparations for the fact I might die. (To protect privacy of loved ones, I can't go into more detail here.)
  • In almost every conversation nowadays, I remind myself that there's a good chance this person is going to die too, if ASI is built. My guess is this helps me not feel totally disconnected from people who don't care about ASI risk, although I am not sure and it is complicated.
  • I have spent a few days going to the tallest building in different cities, to visualise literally everyone die, and to remind myself I am one of the few people on this planet who could actually do something about it. This is a strong motivator for me. I often visualise all the buildings around me collapsing or being destroyed by a large metallic ball.
  • I remind myself of people I have met in the past, for instance people I met during travelling, people who are generally nicer people than I am. I remind myself that all of them are going to die too unless I do something.
  • Of late, I have also started reminding myself of works of art that I appreciate, for instance a mall or subway station I appreciate, or a painting I appreciate, or similar, then remind myself that the effort of all the people who produced this artwrk will be in vain, if ASI is built. I remind myself of some places with natural beauty I have previously visited, and then remind myself all these places will be destroyed. (I can make a list of all these if anyone wants, I'm sure what you find beautiful and I find beautiful has some overlap, but is not the same thing.)
  • (Also, I will be clear when I make an emotional appeal like this: I am not saying preserving the status quo is always good. I am not saying that mass destruction of property is never worth it, or that violently destroying the current way society works is never worth it, or even that genocide is never worth it. I am claiming that in this particular case, building ASI is a bad bet.)
• I am willing to die to stop extinction risk
  • Preventing human extinction due to ASI is more important to me than whether I live or die, whether I get married or not, or whether I end in prison or not.
  • Due to personal experiences (can't share here), I have realised that once you truly accept that some outcome is worse than death, you really are willing to go all-in to stop it. You become less afraid of even extreme actions like murder or suicide, as long said murder or suicide was not in vain.
• "I don't want to live in a dead world"
  • I don't know what it is like for most people to relate to their own death. For instance, many people I've talked to about extinction due to ASI have told me that they don't care about extinction or about preventing it. I often retort back saying that they are lying to themselves, and if they had cancer for instance, they would try to fix it. But I am not entirely sure what it is like inside the head of someone who claims they're okay with extinction, and hence I am not entirely confident in claiming they're compartmentalising or lying to themselves or similar.
  • What I do know is I don't want to live in a world that is dead, regardless of what all these people want for themselves. I am sure that if the world gets saved, atleast some of these people will appreciate me for saving them. The others are not my concern.
  • I don't want to pretend to be enacting humanity's CEV or collective self-interest or similar. I am fully aware that my current description of an ideal world is going to screw over some other people's description of an ideal world. I am not trying to build utopia, I am trying to delay ASI.
• "Blame yourself, preserve your agency"
  • I strongly aspire to Naval Ravikant's heuristic, blame yourself preserve your agency. Have internal not external locus of control. Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that the end of the world is literally my fault if I fail to prevent it.
  • As per the facts, the end of the world is not entirely my fault. Other people's actions are also part of the causal chain of events that are leading to the world ending.
  • However, I have found it a useful mindset to have, to blame myself anyway. For instance, if I try to explain ASI risk to someone and they don't get it, either I can blame them for not being more curious or agentic or putting more effort to understand or whatever, or I can blame myself for not making a better case to them despite all their limitations.
  • Most people are like kids, they have invested their whole life into a strategy that means they cannot do anything much of value with their life. Instead of hoping other people will change their actions, or judging them for not changing their actions, it is useful for me to see them as incompetent and to see myself as the only one who can actually fix the problem.
  • I have intense dislike for (the parts of) people who just accept the current situation as it is and do nothing externally in the real world to fix it. I also have intense dislike for (the parts of) people who narrow their locus of concern to just doing good for immediate family/community/etc, and then lie to themselves that this somehow helps fix civilisation-scale problems. I will dislike myself as a person if I ever became like any of these people.
• "The Truth will endure"
  • See my writeup on "my views on democracy" for more on this.
• I have taken actions that remind me I don't care about other things as much
  • I won't pretend to be an ascetic, or make strong claims on whether living an ascetic life is entirely good or not. However, I do think atleast some of the things that other people care about, I seem to increasingly care less about, the more I work on this problem.
  • For instance, I sat on hunger strike for 18 days, I have spent many days without sleep in order to get clarity on this problem, I had to quit substances to work on this, I anyway am fairly low status-seeking and highly disagreeable, and so on.
  • It is easy to tell yourself, "I dont care about XYZ, I care about fixing ASI risk." But you can prove this to yourself primarily via actions not words.
• I don't want to be depressed
  • I think there is a small probability (not large) that I will become clinically depressed in next 1-2 years, if I fail to find someone else to work on this problem with me.
  • Based on research, having a social circle of size non-zero is very important for mental health. I increasingly only want to spend a large number of hours with others who are working full-time on this problem. I have plenty of friends but I don't spend a lot of time with them because it demotivates me. Finding a cofounder will really help me here, at a very self-interested level.
  • This should go without saying, but I chose to work on this and commit this hard, on purpose, no one forced this on me. You should not join just to save my mental health or some equally stupid reason.
• I want history to remember me
  • I would like my work to be in the history books after I die. I want my work to be remembered. It's less important to me if they remember my face or name or similar.
  • I care less about whether people like my work today, or next month or next year. I care a lot about what people think of my work in a hundred years from now.
  • I think many people working at the AI companies also have similar motivations as me here. See also: Sam Altman on the strength of being misunderstood. The difference is that our motivations are based on the Truth and theirs are not, so hopefully we can break their motivation or their will to live, before they break ours.
• I am not a fan of shaming people, or of status games.
  • It is true that status games are essential for human coordination. The anti-ASI movement will probably need to shame the people working on ASI both online and irl, in order to grow its numbers. Pro-ASI people will need to be ostracised from various social circles, pro-ASI people will find it harder to find dates or get people's respect in various social circles, and so on. I weakly agree with Geoffrey Miller on all this. But also, I am not sure. I am not a political leader or trying to be, so I don't think I need to figure out a crystal clear answer on whether more shaming of these people is to be done or not.
  • At a personal level, I don't like shaming others. I would rather tell an ASI company employee "History will not be kind to you because you did XYZ" than tell them "Shame on you for doing XYZ."

III. What is out of scope?

Persuasion is not our primary goal, leaking information is

Atleast a hundred people in the anti-ASI community are attempting to persuade different target audiences. Atleast a few thousand more are attempting to persuade the public to be anti-AI (without mentioning ASI).

We will have to do a non-zero amount of persuasion ourselves.

• All orgs need to do a non-zero amount of sales aka persuasion, to get the best employees, funders and so on. Hence we will need to some sales too.
• However, we will not make creating anti-ASI propaganda the primary goal of our org. We must stay focussed on our job, and trust that those who are creating the propaganda will do a good job at theirs.
• We might consider creating some propaganda to convert the ideology of people inside the AI companies and US govt in particular. Their current ideology might be nationalist or capitalist or successionist, and we may need to convince them that being anti-ASI is a more compelling ideology. But again, converting all these people won't be our full-time job.

There are multiple target audiences you could aim for, when trying to persuade people to be anti-ASI

• Technical audience or non-technical audience. Traditional religious (christian/jew/hindu/muslim/etc) or libertarian or leftist or liberal or buddhist or similar. Young or old. Urban or rural. Men or women. People in SF bay area or people outside. People working at AI companies or the govt.

There are multiple ways to go about persuasion

• Possibly the most effective is likely waiting till people suffer (such as because of job loss, loss of relationship) and then offering your new worldview to them.
• Other methods include providing countering evidence (lesswrong double cruxes if you want to be formal about it), persuading the people they defer to (such as family/friends/social media influencer/religious or political leaders), or providing them a lot of repeated input about your worldview (music and rituals help).
• There could be more methods I am unaware of.

There are multiple channels via which you can persuade people

• IMO youtube longform videos and yt/tiktok/insta shorts are most effective online. Protests and in-person political speeches can be done offline. There are many other channels you can use.

There are multiple failure modes with creating anti-ASI propaganda

• For instance, empowering the far-left people to run a political movement that is this powerful, might literally turn the US into a communist dictatorship.
• If you go further than that, you could end up with Kaczynski-style anti-Enlightenment ideology that plunges the whole world back into the dark ages.
• I am not yet sure whether I'd be willing to go that far to get an AI pause enforced.
• If you do propaganda in a way that contradicts your own moral values (which is connected to your political ideology), you could damage your own self-esteem.

The most important thing for us to remember is that it's not our full-time job to work on any of this, or catch all the failure modes. We have to trust that someone else will solve all this. If they fail at their job, we are doomed regardless.

Sabotage is not our primary goal

Most attempts at sabotage don't actually help

• If we sabotage a company's work, for instance using a cyberattack, we might slow down the AI race by one year at maximum. This does not help that much.

Sabotage that actually helps a lot is rare

• If we could actually cause TSMC industrial facilities to physically destroy themselves, by gaining remote access to them, I can see a case for this actually helping, and actually delaying ASI by atleast 5 years.
• Or let's say, if we got remote control access to a drone swarm in Taiwan (either legitimately or via hacking), and we used that to destroy a key manufacturing step in the TSMC fabs, I can see a case for this actually helping.
• See also: US stuxnet worm on Iranian nuclear reactors
• There are pros and cons here, not analysing it here.
• Apart from this, I can't see how sabotage actually helps

Leaking information can help, more than sabotage

• Getting a mass movement and getting anti-ASI leaders in power in the US govt, is what can actually stop the race to ASI. To get mass movement, we need to tactically leak info that is useful for this cause.

Assassinations is not our goal

• I thought I was clear enough about this elsewhere, but someone still read this document and assumed I am interested in assassinating people. So yes, I will again make clear that assassinations is not our goal.
• I have no moral issue with assassinations, however I think there are too many competent people in the chains of command of the companies and govts building ASI, and assassinating them is extremely hard (even when compared to hard problems like doing cyberattacks or persuading people). Therefore I am not trying to assassinate anyone.
• Getting a mass movement against the people building ASI is what can change the state of affairs.
• Yes, it is possible this mass movement then starts a violent conflict (civil war, assassinations, etc) however this is not my problem, and those who are more directly involved in politics can figure out how to deal with that.

IV. About key decisions we have to make, and associated morality

About morality in theory versus practice - TO DO

Disclaimer

• This section is still significantly incomplete, and I am still working on it.
• See also: Long list of mental models on morality

I believe in morality as expressed in practice, not morality as expressed via theory

• Most writing on morality is useless
  • Most people are kinda docile and deontologically non-violent by default, even if they claim to be something else. People's claims and actions mismatch very often on this topic.
  • I agree with Paul Graham and Naval Ravikant and many others on the following point: My writeup on morality is so long precisely because I am considering crossing moral lines that most people wouldn't think to cross.
  • To the extent that people do intentionally modify their values, most people copy their moral values from a religion or political ideology, often during a period of intense suffering. Most people don't invent their values from scratch.
  • Most moral philosophy or even political ideology is too abstract and theoretical. It ultimately has to be judged by the actions of its adherents in the real world.
  • I prefer that our moral values, even if written down, are things we can actually enact directly in practice, as opposed to just theory.

another incomplete writeup on morality in theory versus practice

• It is easy for to give a lot of theoretical arguments on why political violence may be justified. Like, here is 20 datapoints showing that the US IC will accelerate towards ASI if even you try to persuade them not to. Here is why Churchill spent his career brainwashing teenagers to walk into their own deaths, and why this was a good thing. Here is why Nelson Mandela's wife asked the followers to throw pipe bombs at their enemies, and why this went fine actually and why Mandela is still on the right side of history. Here is why even non-state actors (aka terrorists) like Operation Valkyrie were actually justified in their plans.
• But I suspect, intellectual arguments are not enough to persuade someone towards engaging in violence. Actually having suffered injustice in your own life is far more effective in persuading someone.
• I am not a psychologist, but here's yet another of my crackpot theories. If you suffer in your life due to harm caused by others, you could go one of two ways. Either you decide that this was horrific and you don't this to happen to anyone ever again, and you disavow violence even more strongly. Or, you decide you are going to be even more violent and dangerous than the person who hurt you, and this way you can ensure it won't happen to you again. I am the second type and I am sympathetic to those who are of the second type as well.

another incomplete writeup on morality in theory versus practice

• (I want to work with people if)
• Your moral code allows for atleast some non-zero amount of violence (not just in theory, but in practice).
• My guess is you're more likely to be this way if you've suffered yourself in the past (for instance growing up with abusive parents or in poverty or war) and hence understand that sometimes violence is the only way to protect yourself, or protect people you care about.
• I am not that keen on working with someone who gets pleasure out of violence for its own sake, but I am keen on working with someone who understands it is sometimes necessary. A little bit of schadenfreude is fine but I don't want that to become our primary motivation.

another incomplete writeup on morality in theory versus practice

• In general I am biased to think that if you've ideally gone through a lot of suffering yourself (for instance growing up with abusive parents or during a war) or else seen a lot of suffering around you, then you're more likely to actually understand that sometimes mass violence is the only correct response, in order to prevent all this suffering.
• For me, the blood of 10,000 people working on ASI is a small price to pay, the polarisation of the country is also a worthwhile price to pay, even a civil war against those building ASI may be worth it, if the end result is preventing the mass murder of literally everyone.
• Now, there is such a thing as fair rules of warfare. Minimise collateral damage. Minimise rape/torture/etc of even the foot soldiers of your enemy. This document is attempting to identify some of these rules. However, the objective is still to cause pain and suffering to those building ASI.
• Also, very direct routes to causing pain and suffering can backfire. For instance, if I go email all the wives/girlfriends/etc of those building ASI and tell them "your husband is a mass murderer, maybe you should leave him" then this seems like a lame action that's unlikely to work. However, if all the social media influencers are unanimously saying that the people building ASI are mass murderers, and the wife's friends are also saying the same thing, then this person is more likely to actually think "maybe I should leave him." The indirect route might be more effective here, if the end goal is ensuring that working on ASI is seen as taboo or evil by society.

Summary of key decisions we have to make, around morality

• As people who leak information of others, our political ideology and morality will ultimately express themselves in the real world in terms of three things
  • Our choice of attack targets. Who are we morally allowed to attack versus not?
  • Our choice of methods. What methods are we morally allowed to use versus not?
  • Our choice of redaction policy. What information we will leak versus redact on moral grounds?

About receiving feedback, including moral feedback

• I think it is important that we be transparent to the public about our estimates of how many people we have hurt and why, both directly and indirectly. We should not hide behind any rationalisations while doing so. Capitalism, democracy, nationalism, etc are not valid rationalisations. Saying we were doing realpolitik with our own country's intelligence agencies or the enemy intelligence agencies (US, UK, etc) is not a valid rationalisation.
• I think we are going to cut off from most feedback (including moral feedback) by operating in such a high-stakes adversarial environment. This could cause us to go too far, morally speaking. We should leave channels to receive public feedback open, especially on moral questions. Most of it will probably be unhelpful, but the small amount that is, will probably make this exercise worth it.

About choice of attack targets, and morality - TO DO

Note to self

• Merge this section with the section on reputation and allies, they are clearly connected sections

Main

• Our attack targets primarily include US AI companies, US intelligence and US executive branch. They could also include US media houses working with these people, other branches of govt working with them, or politicians or billionaires working with them. They could also include other people who I have not listed here. I am not defining a very hard boundary here.
• It is even possible we leak information about people (pretending to be) on our own side, such as anti-ASI politicians that are not actually that anti-ASI. I'm against attacking the ingroup, but for me, the ingroup is people who are actually anti-ASI in their heart, not those part of a social group that claims to be anti-ASI. (TO DO - Think more here. Attacking ingroup is bad for coordination)
• In general, I would prefer leaking information only about the people at the top 1 to 3 levels in the chain of command of each of these orgs. I would prefer not leaking information about random employees. However, this is not a hardline stance from my side, and I am open to leaking information about random employees too, if it helps the cause.
• I am open to attacking and acquiring information about everyone. However, once we have acquired this information, I would prefer redacting information about random employees if it doesn't help our cause.

About choice of redaction policy, and morality

Our goal is getting anti-ASI leaders to power in the US govt, that's it.

• Get the pro-ASI people out of power, by leaking information about them that damages their prospects for acquiring power. This includes leaking information of pro-ASI people pretending to be anti-ASI in public.
• All this helps increase the probability that the leaders we finally get are actually anti-ASI, and not just pretending to be.
• This includes heads of intelligence, executive branch, people in congress and senate. (To a lesser extent, includes other institutions such as US supreme court or various regulatory bodies.) This includes heads of AI companies.
• Not just heads but atleast 1 or 2 levels down the chain of command from them too.

Redaction policy to get anti-ASI people in power

• I think the most important information we should leak is regarding pressures faced by anti-ASI leaders, as they face these pressures in realtime. I expect anti-ASI leaders trying to acquire power will face many pressures against them, and a lot of these pressures will not be visible to the public.
  • For instance, pro-ASI leaders might physically intimidate anti-ASI leaders. Pro-ASI leaders might go after anti-ASI leaders' donors, or their donors' extended network. Pro-ASI leaders might go after media houses that work with anti-ASI leaders, or the funders of these media houses.
  • Pro-ASI leaders are likely to include heads of intelligence, heads of AI companies, heads of US executive branch, and some politicians. I am concerned about all of them but I am most concerned about heads of intelligence. Anti-ASI leaders are likely to some other politicians, and some protest and mass movement leaders.
  • I want this conflict to play out completely in the open. That way atleast it is transparent who has what stance and what methods they used, and the public can form their opinion on this.
  • If the public feels certain methods are unethical or distasteful, then they can form opinions accordingly. Right now a lot of people in positions of power are forced to self-censor because they face pressures, that the public cannot see but only speculate about.
  • It is important to leak all this in real time while it happens, and while there's a competing political force (the anti-ASI movement) that can actually beat the pro-ASI factions. Afterwards, it may be too late, because the pro-ASI people may have already won the conflict, and have too much unaccountable power, and it may be too hard for anti-ASI leaders to put up a fight. If one side has sufficient unaccountable power, then even leaking info about them may not actually move the needle.
  • Example - Before the 2016 US election, wikileaks published emails about how various DNC members had conspired to favour Hillary Clinton's campaign over Bernie Sander's campaign. This lead to some loss of popularity for Clinton, and made it easier for Trump to win the election. The emails were provided by anonymous hacker group guccifer 2.0.
  • Example - Assange leaked info about the security firm that was hired to spy on him and his child
  • TO DO - list more examples here
• We will leak personal abuse stories (like rape, intimidation, etc) but will redact personal information otherwise (drugs, sex, family/friend conflicts, etc).
  • Solving rape or getting justice for the rape victims is not my primary goal here. However, this is a good way to get pro-ASI people thrown in prison.
  • (If we meet such victims, I think it is important that we be honest to such people that we are allies, not friends, and there are limits to how much we can actually help them.)
  • Examples - Sam Altman has been accused of sexually assaulting his sister. ex-Prince Andrew was arrested and lost public support after being proven as having committed sexual assault, in the Epstein files. Many other people in the Epstein files have been accused of sexual assault, but there is only hearsay and no conclusive proof. If you had actual proof, and you had a mass movement around it, this would be sufficient to get people in prison in my opinion.
  • Example of something we will redact - Wikileaks has leaked information about powerful people soliciting sex workers in countries where this is legal. I don't think this is all that relevant to our cause, and hence I would not prioritise leaking information like this.
• We will build a picture of democratic safeguards being broken
  • I don't intrinsically have complete faith in democracy. See my writeup on "my views on democracy" for more on this.
  • However, I think a world with more democratic safeguards in the US makes it easier for anti-ASI leaders to get power, and a more authoritarian US govt makes it easier for the pro-ASI leaders to get power.
  • Example - Snowden exposed how various Congress and Senate members, Supreme Court judges, the FBI, and other people were simply not consulted or informed, when the NSA decided to create their most recent mass surveillance programs. This has increased popularity of an anti-surveillance and anti-IC position among the public. I expect something very similar to happen, by default, in the relationship between the ASI companies and the US IC.
• We will expose people who support human extinction (aka successionists aka Nick Land's followers) and are accelerating ASI in real life.
  • Many people working at the AI companies support human extinction due to ASI takeover. Some people think any ASI taking over is fine, some people think the ASI will probably be benevolent and ASI takeover is fine if the ASI is benevolent.
  • Both these stances are highly unpopular among the public, as I think they should be. I also don't support an ASI takeover. I might support one if I knew with high likelihood the ASI would actually be aligned to me (not others), but I don't think there's high likelihood of that.
  • If we expose a public list of people who support ASI takeover, and are actively bulding ASI, I think this will make the AI companies even more unpopular among the public.
  • I think people suporting ASI takeover and building ASI and hiding their beliefs, these are the most dangerous people. People who are merely supporting ASI takeover but not buildinh ASI, them I am slightly less concerned about. I want to punish dangerous actions more than I want to punish free speech.
  • Examples - Elon Musk accused Larry Page of supporting an ASI takeover that causes human extinction. Larry Page has controlling interest in Google, and by extension, Deepmind. Jurgen Schmidhuber supports an ASI takeover, and many of Deepmind's early employees including Shane Legg, Marcus Hutter and Sepp Hochreiter were trained at Schmidhuber's lab IDSIA. If we had actual proof, not hearsay, that Deepmind is run by people who support human extinction, this could shift public opinion against them.

Redaction policy to enforce AI pause after we have anti-ASI people in power

• As of today, govts can both surveill and control the GPU manufacturing facilities and the large compute clusters. Both of these cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Scroll to the "methods" for some methods they will use. If truly anti-ASI people run the US and Chinese govts, enforcing an AI pause is not hard.
• However, if the AI pause is not enforced quickly enough, the following may become possible:
  • Existing stockpile of household GPUs is used to coordinate a distributed training run fully anonymously (using Tor and monero payments)
  • Continued algorithmic progress allows a small number of private individuals to use their existing stockpile of household GPUs and build ASI without building a large compute cluster
• In this case, we may personally need to identify small groups of rogue actors that are trying to build ASI, and leak information about their existence. Doing so will make it easier for the anti-ASI leaders to enforce the AI pause on them too.

About choice of methods, and morality - TO DO

Most important reference writeup: Morality of cyberhacking versus social engineering versus whistleblowing

• Note to self - Should I literally just copy this writeup here?

De-escalation - TO DO

• I need to define some clear guidelines for when we de-escalate the violence we ourselves have started. Common failure modes of mass movements with outgroups is to go too far, especially after they have enough power to actually get away with mass violence.
• For instance an obvious threshold is if the heads of any US AI company voluntarily shut down their own company, then we stop targetting them and anyone in their company.
• There may be other thresholds I need to think through.

My personal history with morality - TO DO

If you are considering working with me, I recommend writing your own list of previous experiences that have shaped your moral values. Whether you show it to me or the public is your choice.

Why is this section included in this post?

• Normally I try to keep my professional and personal sections of the website somewhat separate, but I made an exception for this post, because it talks so much about morality which is intrinsically personal.
• I currently think extrapolating one's past history with morality, in practice not theory, is the best way to predict how moral one will be in the future. I don't have high hopes in moral philosophy theory.
• I think people can change their morality over time, but my guess is this is usually a slow process. Experiences with suffering can accelerate people changing their values in a short span of time.
• I want to become a more violent person with time, because I think more violence is required to solve ASI risk (and more generally, most zero-sum political battles). So I wanted to track all the details of whether I am becoming more violent or less violent and in what ways.

Personal history with violence versus non-violence

• I would murder my perfect clones or my friends in cold blood, if it was guaranteed that only I survive or they survive. I do currently think I am locked into a fight unto the death with people very similar to myself, who are working at or leading the AI companies.
• The fact that they share a lot of values and traits with me is less important. The fact that they are some of the only people on Earth who even partially agree with me on ASI risk is less important. The more important fact is that they threaten to kill me. I would be ready to kill someone who threatens my life, even if they do it out ignorance not malovence.
• (Disclaimer - I am not starting a group to make hundreds of simultaneous assassinations. I think that's too hard and there are easier ways to solve this.)
• Over many years of my life, I have many times contemplated using violence to solve problems in my life. I have never had to do it in practice though. I think ASI risk is the first big problem I am facing, where I think I have to use violence to solve it.
• I am not squeamish watching murder or rape videos, as long as there is no gore. My empathy for people is somewhat switched off by default. I can at times turn up the empathy dial when required, but also I can be quite functional with the dial turned off. I would have loved to live in a utopia where I could have high empathy for everyone all the time, but I don't think I live in a utopia.
• I have some experience with violence from childhood, but in order to protect privacy of family members, I cannot talk more about this on a public document.
• (I don't have actual experience with killing anyone myself, and it seems quite hard to forecast how I would react, in advance of this actually happening. But my guess is I could get atleast partially used to it, if I was convinced it was the right thing to do. I would be more concerned with how to distance myself from people trying to apply social pressure on me and tell me I did something wrong.)

Personal history with truth-seeking versus deception

• Write about why I lean against deception (such as social engg) and blackmail as methods to use. See above: I am very attached to truth and want to preserve humanity's long-term ability to correct errors.
• TO DO

Personal history with keeping versus breaking promises

• I care a fair bit about keeping promises. This is also related to honesty. I think you need a base of other people trusting you to be honest, before they can trust you to keep your commitments to them.
• In practice, I avoid making promises as much as possible. I think the world is changing very fast, and I am changing very fast, and I don't want to restrain my future self a lot, just to keep promises with others.
• So far, I have found very few people who I genuinely consider worth coordinating with long-term, most people are almost useless to my goals. (I am hoping to change this soon, by meeting relevant people.)
• I have noticed that friendships often come with unspoken commitments, and nowadays I default more towards making the unspoken stuff more explicitly spoken aloud, to avoid misunderstandings. For instance, people assume that just because you spend a lot of time with them now, that you'll continue to do so forever. Or people assume that if you don't spend time with them, it means you don't care about them or won't help them in an emergency. And so on.
• TO DO

Personal history with respecting versus violating liberal consent norms

• As a teenager I have multiple times violated liberal consent norms in (what I think were) low stakes ways, like "borrowing" someone's notebook without permission to copy their work, or checking someone's phone without asking them, or setting up and using phishing websites or keyloggers.
• As an adult, I think I have more or less taken consent seriously in all situations, where someone asked me to take their consent seriously.
• There are edge cases where I think applying liberal consent norms is not straightforward, and I seem to lean towards not caring as much about explicit consent in these edge cases. For instance I have scraped people's websites without their permission, but then again, I think it is kinda stupid to expect strangers on the internet to ask for your permission before using your publicly available content. Or I have sold cryptocurrency tokens in low-key scam situations, but again, people did technically consent to buying those tokens, I didn't actively deceive them or force them to buy these tokens at gunpoint. Or I may have written anonymised public accounts of things people have told me, without asking for explicit consent every single time. There are some edge case romantic scenarios too I won't discuss here for privacy reasons.
• TO DO

Personal history with respecting versus not respecting authority

• As of today, I actively disrespect almost all forms of authority, and actively encourage other people to disrespect authority as well. In this world, I find very few people with authority that I think was genuinely earned. This includes most education systems, parenting, govts, and so on. I disliked authority when younger too, but maybe expressed my dislike less. (Can't reveal all details here for privacy reasons.)
• I don't get much pleasure out of being edgy or trolling or similar. I don't see it as funny. When I say I "disrespect" authority I mean I either get into a conflict head-on, or I figure out how to exit the situation ASAP so I don't have to waste my time with it. (I am aware that in the real world, authority often gets subverted when groups make jokes about it. Status games are important.)
• Most forms of authority are ultimately enforced at gunpoint (various authorities collude with the state implicitly or explicitly), and I am genuinely fine with a lot of violence in response, to ensure only people who deserve authority get access to it. (Yes, the details of the type of violence matters, I am not saying every country should erupt into civil war immediately, I am just sharing that emotionally I think I am fine with a lot of violence here.)
• Whenever I've tried to take on a position of authority myself in the past, one principle I've tried to make especially clear is that people are allowed to Exit if they don't believe in the work, and I don't want to work with people who don't actually believe in the work either. My previous attempts to take on leadership roles have not worked out very well, be it in startup or college club or similar, Ray Dalio's personality test agrees with me, I will have to improve on multiple axes if I ever want to become a leader myself.
• TO DO

V. About reputation, allies, funding, etc

About trust and reputation - TO DO

Write about whose trust we actually need to earn. (hackers? whistleblowers? rape victims? journalists?)

Only if we need to earn someone's trust do we need to build a long-term reputation. Otherwise, we can just ask everyone else to go fuck themselves.

• I think I need to be nicer to neutral people here lol. You don't know ahead of time who is going to help you in what way, so it is better to just be helpful to everyone by default, as long as they're not working with the enemy.
• Don't take the opinions of neutral people too seriously. But also, minimise collateral damage of neutral people as much as possible, as already written elsewhere in this doc.

(Note to self - lmao I now see why being trustworthy to everyone makes sense for some people. If you don't know ahead of time who your allies and enemies will be, you may as well be trustworthy to everyone. I don't think this works for us though, because we do have an outgroup we want to screw over.)

About allies, and funding - TO DO

Allies we probably need

• Funding - We need funding to hire the best talent. This is the biggest reason by far for wanting allies.
• Legal protection - We need to at minimum ensure our own country's intelligence agency won't imprison us themselves. At best, we would like to ensure they will protect us legally from others trying to sue us or physically threaten us. This requires us to ideally have contacts within these agencies who can guarantee this.
• Insiders - It would be very helpful (though not absolutely essential) to have whistleblowers inside the US AI companies and US govt who are willing to work with us, possibly even risking their life to do so.
• Improved decision-making - Actors outside our org (such as competent anti-ASI politicians) might be able to help us with decision-making, such as which leaks are useful versus not for the anti-ASI movement.

Allies we probably don't need

• Recruitment - We probably don't need any allies to help us with recruiting, and we can just recruit on our own using twitter and github and similar. However, I am not completely sure. There may be people or orgs running our recruitment pipelines who we want to be on good terms with.
  • (Note to self - Like who? Some universities? Startup incubators? Some random ass salespeople? We obviously can't use any of the usual recruitment pipelines, once we become famous, people won't invite us as easily. Like, Assange found people at CCC not at his college or startup incubator or similar, for instance)
• Attention - I don't think we should ally with any media house. We should let the leaks become popular on their own via twitter or other social media. If the leaks are actually important, we will definitely get the public's attention, and get credit for it. There will ofcourse be a smear campaign against us, but I think we will get enough attention to tell our side of the story.

We could ally with anti-ASI politicians and movement or protest leaders

• Quite bluntly, I think the current set of anti-ASI (not just anti-AI) social media influencers and protest leaders is nowhere close to the political skill level required to rally tens of millions of people behind them. You can measure skill in terms of number of people behind them. 100M people > 10M people > 1M people > 100k people. Since current set of anti-ASI leaders mostly has less than 100k followers, I don't take their decisions to ally with me versus not, too seriously. (Some of these people have publicly denounced me, because I endorse cyberhacking.)
• You can read books or speeches of actual politicians like LKY or Nehru or Mandela or similar, to get a better sense for what actual political skill looks like. I really like Dominic Cummings' writings on Otto van Bismarck for example.
• Most anti-ASI political leaders who want power above all else - will tend to publicly denounce us when we are unsuccessful, but might tactically use our leaks when it suits their interests.
• And if one leader doesn't further broadcast the leak, for instance because they genuinely dislike our values or methods, some other leader will. This is what has happened in all historical leaks like this, that were actually important.
• If the anti-ASI politicians who actually get power are at Bismarck-level of competence, they will obviously know what to do with vigilante hacker groups like us, just as they will know what to do with groups operating more legally. If people of such skill emerge, I will actually be fine defering to their decision-making atleast to some extent.
• It is possible one of these politicians even privately donates to us, while publicly denouncing us.

I'm unsure if we should attack politicians who are claiming to be anti-ASI but not actually anti-ASI

• Incomplete writeups on this topic:
  • On one hand, it is possible the anti-ASI politicians are merely pretending to be anti-ASI, and leaking this info is valuable. On the other hand, attacking people claiming to be on our side is basically a guarantee that these people won't ally with us. Also, there's a possibility we end up wrong and they truly are anti-ASI, which we may find out only once we have targeted them significantly and they know.
  • I am pretty confident that leaking information doesn't worsen this problem, as long as we symmetrically attack everyone. For instance, suppose Alice and Bob are both anti-ASI politicians, but one of them is more trustworthy and competent than the other. If we leak information about neither Alice nor Bob, then we haven't made the problem worse. If we attack both Alice and Bob, and we find out that Alice is truly anti-ASI but Bob is just pretending to be, and we leak this information, again we haven't made the problem worse. If we intentionally side with either Alice or Bob, and only leak information about the other one, that is where we run some risk of making the problem worse.

We could ally with people supportive of Indian or Russian or NK or Israeli or any other govt, who dont want their govt to be disempowered by the race to ASI.

• Again, it is possible someone like this provides a significant donation to us.

I have a strong preference that we don't sell our zero days or unredacted datasets to other hacker groups

• On moral grounds, I don't think we should sell the zero days to any other hacker groups. We should trust that we will eventually get sufficient donations.
  • TO DO - think more here, you already said you don't have any hardline stances. Is this a hardline stance based on self-esteem, or do you just think you'll get more donations or allies if you take this stance?
• I think we have a very specific set of moral lines we are willing to cross, versus not willing to cross. If we sell our zero days or our unredacted datasets to other hacker groups, it will be difficult to enforce these moral lines on them as well.
• Example 1
  • Most other hacker groups are motivated by money more than political ideology. As a result, they make money via (in descending order of value) stealing trade secrets and research capabilities of large orgs and selling them to competitors, providing realtime intelligence to militaries so they're more effective, stealing cryptocurrency from hot wallets, locking people's data and demanding ransom, stealing random API keys to resell credits, and stealing compute resources to run crypto miners on them.
  • If we were to take this route, we could for example make a lot of money by selling the github repos or the holy grail, the model weights, of an AI company, to competing AI companies.
  • However, I don't think we should do this as it could shorten timelines to ASI.
• Example 2
  • If we sell our zero days to other hacker groups, they could end up hitting a lot of targets besides our actual targets. This could get us more funding, but also increase the number of people we have hurt.
  • I strongly prefer we don't do this. The bigger reason is I will lose some self-esteem, and it's not clear if we get a big enough reward in return. Also, if we are not clear on who our outgroup is, and start causing damage to random bystanders, it will make coordination hard even within our ingroup. For instance, anti-ASI politicians may no longer want to work with us.
• If we are successful, I expect our org to eventually become the Schelling point for all anti-ASI cyberhackers on Earth, and for a large number of cyberhackers to eventually become anti-ASI, and for us to eventually hire almost all these people. The question of working versus not working with other groups is only relevant while we are unable to just recruit everyone to our own org.

Example

• Wikileaks got over $25 million in crypto donations. We don't know who donated this amount. There is significant probability IMO that a Chinese or Russian person donated this, for instance, because they shared Assange's interest in weakening the US intelligence community. There is also a significant probability ofcourse that was some random American. This is pure speculation from my side.

About PR and backfire effects

I think the short version is that pursuing radical plans makes you less popular among some demographics and more popular among others.

• I respect people who pursed radical plans more than I respect average people, because they atleast took something seriously enough to actually go act on it in the real world. This includes Hitler or Kaczynski or Aum Shinrikyo or Bhagat Singh or Operation Valkyrie or similar. I don't think I am the only person who thinks this way.
• I have a possibly crackpot theory called MtG colour wheel, into which I have sorted various ideologies. People are more Black will respect you more if you try something radical like assassination or cyberattack or whatever, and people who are less Black will respect you less. Certain people are predisposed to be power-seeking and others are not (could be due to childhood, genetics, important life events, I don't know.)
• To put it in simpler words, some tech founders will respect us more, some successful social media influencers might respect us more, some billionaires and politicians will respect us more, some libertarians will respect us more, some radical leftists will respect us more. Traditional religious people will respect us less, classical liberals will respect us less, average people with no strong religious/political leanings will respect us less, and so on.
• Among the above set of power-seeking people too, there could be ideological differences that make us less popular among some demographics. Some billionaires won't respect us because they're following positive sum pro-capitalism cached heuristics, which we won't. Some social media influencers won't respect us because they're too leftist and we're not. Some politicians won't respect us because they're too authoritarian (and hence genuinely dislike vigilantes, not just pretend to). And so on.
• Ofcourse, even the people who respect our work might not publicly say so, for lots of obvious reasons.
• I have not done surveys to say all this with confidence (maybe I should?), but this is my guess based on many people I've talked to about such plans.

VI. About our capabilities

About methods

There are a number of technical legal or legally grey ways we could get information out of US AI companies or US govt:

• We could interview ex-employees or people in their immediate social circle.
  • Examples of such youtubers - people who interviewed Daniel Kokotajlo or Suchir Balaji's family or similar on youtube
• We could support whistleblowers who come out the legal way and then fight a lawsuit against their emplower.
  • Examples of such orgs - Securedrop, FOPF, EFF, ACLU, Tor project, etc. (This is a long list of orgs.) AI whistleblower initiative is an EA-affiliated org.
• We could analyse the public internet for information. This could include, for example, building an AI doxxing tool, or purchasing PII datasets on dark web, or both. We might get sued if we were in US/UK while we did this. This lawsuit might be winnable.
  • Examples of doxxing tools exist on github and hackernews, we could accelerate their work. (I am aware doxxing tools have downside, but I think this is inevitable.)
• We could analyse public satellite data.
  • Examples - Epoch AI and SemiAnalysis use satellite data to track compute clusters (aka datacenters).
• We could setup CCTV cameras or drone swarms (or maybe even gigapixel cameras) to surveill public areas outside US govt or US AI company buildings, or these people's private residences. We will probably get sued if we were in US/UK while we did this. This lawsuit might be winnable, depending on where exactly we place the cameras.
• We could trawl through trash cans outside their buildings, or find another Pizza index-like indicator.
  • Example - Dominic Cummings obtained Gould's political campaign plans this way, hence I am optimistic we can find some low-tech method like this.

I definitely think we should do atleast some of these things listed above.

• Maybe we can also expect some orgs who are placed in US/UK to do these things instead. As in, this might not be our competitive advantage.
• We should not assume other orgs are competent at their job, however. We may have to do some of it ourselves regardless.

There are a number of illegal methods we can use, if we have someone in-person and willing to risk their life over it, and commit a one-off act.

• We could support a whistleblower who wants to leak info, and then leave the country.
  • Example - I have worked on a US govt whistleblower database and guide. Wikileaks took on risk by helping such whistleblowers. A few orgs are willing to provide legal advice to such whistleblowers only after they have left the country, when the risk to the lawyer is much lower. Example - FOPF, Lawrence Lessig, etc
• We could ask them to record video footage on camera, and then leave the country. We could ask them to use drone swarms or gigapixel cameras or break into buildings or other means of getting information, and then leave the country.
• We could ask them to provide us with access to secure logins, or information about vulnerabilities in US govt or AI company systems, which we could then use to hack into these systems.
• We could ask them to leak data from military satellites that do 0.03 metre resolution sufficient for facial recognition.

My biggest problem with most of the above is that I don't think most whistleblowers have the psychological makeup to succeed at doing video recordings or similar. Hence I don't currently think we should recommend whistleblowers to do any of these things.

Why do I believe this?

• I have studied all govt whistleblowers leaking classified info in last 80 years. A lot of them have made very obvious blunders in opsec. A lot of them have struggled with serious mental health issues, for instance due to being disconnected from their social circle. Losing your entire ideology and identity, and having to act in complete secrecy, is really hard, for someone who has no training with any of this.
• Every week that these people delay in leaving the country is more psychological damage they are taking, more chances for them to slip and make a mistake.
• I have read atleast some public manuals on how intense level of military psychological training works - be it for actual spies, or SEALs or Berets or similar. This type of training takes many months, and is done in a much more supportive environment, as compared to that of a whistleblower.

It is possible that if the situation is sufficiently desperate, we may one day (soon) have to recommend people try these things. I don't think we are there yet. (Open to discussion.)

This leaves us with illegal methods that can be done over long-term sustained basis by people, but only by people outside the country.

• We could cyberattack any of these computer systems fully knowing we will never be arrested, even if we succeed multiple times, or face multiple counterattacks.

The most important thing is that I am not married to specific methods. I will happily use whatever turns out most effective in terms of time and money invested from our side.

About our own opsec - TO DO

Opsec broadly consists of technical opsec (cybersecurity and network security, physical security of devices, etc) and social circle. Studying social circle is way more important and neglected of the two.

The primary secrets we need to keep are the specifics of our attack capabilities, and any unredacted information on adversaries that we collect. Everything else doesn't really need to be secret.

Minimising psychological damage

• I strongly believe that large groups that keep secrets remain more psychologically healthy as opposed to small groups that keep secrets.
• We necessarily will have to keep some secrets as we will be redacting files before publishing them.
• However, I think we should just start with a small group of people anyway, and accept the psychological damage that comes with it.
• The cost of letting unskilled people onto our team is too high, as other skilled people will look at this and not want to join.
• I think it may be a good idea to also allow employees to bring a few loved ones into the group. But then, these people will have to maintain a low freuquency of contact from their extended social network as well, in order to join our group.
• We can allow some communication from people outside to inside the group, but it seems likely we will have to monitor all of it. Either we as cofounders monitor it ourselves, or we allow the group to monitor it as a whole and make non-binding votes first. Some of our employees may have a problem with this, hence we will have to make this clear in advance.
• Secrets are especially damaging if you feel they're immoral to keep, or if you don't have enough people around you who you can discuss the secret with.
• This is one reason why it is very important we have our moral values and redaction policy clear in advance.
• If you have a large group of people who know the secret, you're not trapped with any specific person. Our employees will naturally create and break friendships with time, for whatever reasons. This becomes harder to do if they know secrets that only a few other people know.
• We could build a redaction tool to minimise the amount of time required to redact information.
• I think we should have everyone in the group in the know all the unredacted information we get, to minimise psychological damage undertaken by any one specific person. I don't think we should implement compartmentalisation.
• In short, I think we have to follow something very similar to the Ray Dalio playbook for gossiping information. A high level of transparency inside the group, but all communication to and from the outside world is monitored by those inside the group. I am unsure if we will have to centralise decision-making on this as much as Ray Dalio did, or not.
• I have thought of lots of ways of building this group such that we can avoid having to do redactions, and therefore, avoiding having to store important secrets in our head. Having to keep secrets is what makes running this group so hard. I don't have any good answer to that though, besides what is listed above.

Why do I so strongly believe that large groups with secrets are more psychologically healthy than both small groups with secrets, or individuals with secrets?

• Books by psychologists such as Michael Slepian and others.
  • Most psychologists lack a background of working with criminals, or law enforcement, or national security circles, or billionaire/politicians. Hence they lack understanding of the secrecy guarantees that these people operate.
  • Psychologists tend to have a general bias that secrets kept alone damage their keepers, and have lots of reasons for why.
  • For instance, you have to speak more slowly whenever an innocent conversation reaches a topic close enough to your secret, so that you don't spontaneously reveal it. If you have to do this often enough, this affects your ability to form human connection in general.
• My own crackpot theories such as precomputation theory, or Duncan Sabien's social dark matter.
  • Usually people don't want a secret to remain secret till they die, they just want privacy for some time duration, while they first process its implications. After that, they run mind simulations of others, and try to pre-compute how others will react to this, and what's the best way to present this to others in a way that they look good (such that it gets them power or love or whatever it is they care about).
  • Such secrets typically include personal experiences surrounding sex, death, money, relationship conflicts (includes parenting and marriage), morality and politics, physical and mental health (includes substance use)
  • Running mind simulations of others is cognitively expensive and can be painful, especially running simulations of people who may socially disapprove of you for instance. People don't want to run these mind simulations while they are in the middle of an experience (surrounding sex, death, relationship conflicts, etc) whose implications they themselves haven't processed yet.
• I've read atleast a few accounts of spies and analysts at intelligence agencies, who talk about how knowing the actual truth about something, disconnects you from the rest of the world who endlessly speculate nonsense (because the latter don't know the truth.)
• I've read atleast a couple manuals on psychological training provided to Navy SEALs or similar, to increase their ability to handle mental stress (including yes, the stress of wanting to reveal a secret in some casual conversation).

On technical opsec - TO DO

• I have lots of writeups elsewhere on how to do technical opsec. (ugh should I bother to write this stuff here, yet again? I can actually, it demonstrates that I have knowledge on the topic. Other hackers know this stuff too, but it'll help them to know I know it too.)
• Actually good opsec has tight rules and is moderately simple. It is a bad idea to increase cognitive load, only to implement a half-assed opsec that doesn't get you much benefits.

Location - TO DO

Base of operations will most probably be a house in either India or Russia. We have to finalise one of these locations, soon. My guess is I am ready to live together after a couple months of working together as trial run.

I think this decision is mostly just going to end up hinging on which network I tap into, to find a cofounder or early employees.

Why?

• Ideally, I would like to work with a nuclear-armed country whose executive or intelligence actually recognises how dangerous ASI actually is, and supports an AI pause, and is willing to wage war against those countries that build ASI anyway. As of 2026-05, zero out of the nine nuclear-armed countries fall into this bracket.
• I definitely don't work to work with a country that is actively racing towards ASI themselves, and unwilling to change their mind about it.
• After that, there are a number of instrumental considerations listed below, like who will protect us more, where I can more easily find cofounder and funding, and so on.

TO DO

• figure out the location

My current considerations on choice of location

Choice of location

1. India
   • Pros
     • Easiest for me because I'm a citizen and resident. Under no circumstances can I be deported. Even being extradited seems unlikely based on historical data. Also I know the language, have cultural background, already know about all the conferences and universities and so on which I could use.
     • Indian intelligence agencies are low in competence by global standards. This means I have a lot of leverage against them, if I and other team members are competent.
       • (At a moral level, sure, I could be happy that Indian govt doesn't invest as much resources into bullying other govts into giving it crude oil, and that Indian economy is doing not that bad despite this fact. But right now all this doesn't matter.)
       • We can use this leverage to a) not blindly follow the chain of command of Indian intelligence, and take independent choices on who to attack, what to redact, etc and b) actually post our takes publicly even if this affects Indian intelligence or executive branch's self-image by a little. (If the takes affect it a lot, we may still need to censor ourselves.)
       • I think being able to post our takes publicly is important and useful, because it enforces clear thinking and lets us get feedback from the outside world, including on moral questions. Computation among humans is a group process, and you want people outside your tiny bubble to also be a part of it.
       • I also think being able to post our takes publicly is important because it helps earn the trust of the public of various countries, that the motivation behind our actions is anti-ASI ideology, not nationalism.
   • Cons
     • Finding other people to work on this seems hard. Almost no one here is ASI-pilled. Most of the most competent people all leave for US/UK/EU/Canada, either for the money or to escape their parents and Indian culture more broadly. The intersection of competent and atheist (and hence likely to buy an anti-ASI worldview) and not trying to escape parents is not that large, although it exists.
     • There is still a small but real possibility of getting extradited. Indian govt still has a positive geopolitical relationship with the US govt.
2. Russia
   • Pros
     • There are in fact some competent hackers here. Finding them is quite hard, and many of them just work for the govt or top cybsercurity companies, but yes. There are also incompetent people ofcourse, and filtering is still required.
     • If I am asking someone to shift from US/EU/UK/etc, they might find less cultural barrier to shifting to Russia, than to India where I live.
   • Cons
     • Doompilling these hackers is probably still hard.
     • Have to invest time learning the language.
     • Especially after visiting here, I have understood that it will be very difficult for us to build enough leverage to get any independence from the russian intelligence agencies.
       • It seems a lot more likely that a) we won't be able to post anything publicly and b) we will have to atleast partially respect the chain of command of russian intelligence agencies, once we are somewhat famous (if we are not famous we can fly under the radar).
       • I don't know if it is rational from Putin's point of view to enforce censorship and chain of command this strongly. I will avoid publicly speculating on the reasons for this. In any case, it seems unlikely I can just tag him on twitter and change his mind on a question like this. I just have to accept the current reality as it is.
       • I think not being able to post our takes publicly is bad because it will prevent us from getting outside feedback and worsen the clarity of our thinking
3. Find someone from US/UK/Germany/etc and ask them to shift here
   • Pros
     • Most of the world's most competent hackers are here. For instance all the hackers in CCC, Berlin, or all the security conferences or startups in SF. As always, there are a lot of incompetent people trying to raise money or do security theatre, but there are also a genuinely large number of competent people. SF clearly has highest talent density on Earth by very wide margin, when it comes to software or cybersecurity.
     • Most of the doompilled people are also here. Especially focussed on SF. But also, EA billionaires have spent money in many western universities to spread the word.
   • Cons
     • Asking someone to abandon their entire social circle and shift countries is very hard.
     • Unless I find someone at the intersection of hacker and doompilled, I still need to doompill some hacker(s) and this is still hard.
     • All the other cons mentioned above still apply.
4. Israel
   • I am a little unsure here.
   • Cons
     • Israel is allied with US temporarily, so not my first bet honestly.
   • Pros
     • On the flipside, they do have many of the best hackers.
     • Also, their AI models are significantly behind the US, so they will get disempowered by the race to superintelligence too. If they aren't offered clear seats on the US coalition aiming for ASI, they might want to attack the US as well.

My current preference order seems to be 3 > 2 > 1, based on the limited data I currently have. I have to go to SF.

Countries I have eliminated, as where to maintain base of operations

• All US-allied countries (US/UK/EU/Canada/Australia)
  • For obvious reasons, base of operations can't be here. (Some people think Switzerland / Netherlands / Denmark are safer but I strongly think they're wrong, based on both actual evidence, and my view of geopolitics.)
• China
  • I am a little unsure here.
  • Cons
    • In general, Chinese govt does not support non-state actors doing anything, especially anything political.
    • Also they have frontier AI companies that are copy-pasting the research of US AI companies. This complicates things.
• Pakistan
  • Incompetent at hacking.
• North Korea
  • My gut says don't work with North Korean govt, for all the obvious reasons.
• All non-nuclear countries
  • (not that I know of any such country with good hackers anyway. Dubai? Singapore? idk which other country these blockchain people seem to love)

(I no longer endorse the above para. note to self - shift it somewhere else)

Why I think we can win - TO DO

• important - based on feedback received
• list even more historical examples
• show evidence the offence-defence balance is changing. (Update - Claude Mythos happened, I think it might be PR, but atleast it's now way easier to convince people as compared to a year back, when I first wrote about this)

"I used the AI to destroy the AI"

Examples of cyberhackers leaking information for political reasons

I endorse some of these but not necessarily all.

• DNC leak
• Podesta leak
• Stratfor leak
• Blueleaks
• Shadown brokers leak

VII. Target audience - cofounder and feedback - TO DO

I am looking for a cofounder, and for feedback. However I am looking for both of these things from a fairly narrow audience.

The most important thing is that when you find the right person, you know. Theory gets you only so far when predicting who will be a good fit or not, theory is just my (bad) extrapolations from my past life experiences. Sometimes you just have to run the experiment, work with someone for a short duration and see how it goes.

Worldview/morality/motivation of the ideal people I wanna work with

All that being said, here are my guesses for worldview of a cofounder, and worldview of someone who I want feedback from. I generally want someone with similar worldview/morality/motivation as me.

1. Your moral code allows for atleast some non-zero amount of violence (not just in theory, but in practice).
   • See my writeup on "morality in theory versus practice" for more on this.
2. You are atleast somewhat pro-capitalism and pro-democracy
   • See my writeup on "my views on democracy" for more on this.
3. You are anti-ASI
   • The easiest way to this is if you've read Yudkowsky's work and are atleast somewhat persuaded by it.
4. You are atleast somewhat ambitious and power-seeking.
5. You have atleast somewhat attempted to emotionally internalise the risks from ASI, not just treat it as an intellectual game.
   • (This is not a 100% necessary condition from my side, but it helps.)

I am primarily interested in the opinions of people who satisfy ALL of the following conditions. I am less interested (but not completely uninterested) in the opinions of everyone else. If you are providing feedback on this post, I am a lot more likely to take your feedback seriously if you indicate that you satisfy all the conditions.

Competencies of the ideal people I wanna work with

• Obviously your competencies need to complementary to me, not identical to mine.
• Summary of the competencies of the ideal people I wanna work with
  • I am Investigator and Strategist on Ray Dalio's personality test.
  • I think my biggest strength is generalist research and creating new ideas. I think this is valuable even for this org, because many people who have tried to do similar stuff (fighting intelligence communities, corporations, etc) have failed, often even gone to prison. For example, wikileaks, but it is a long list of people. I think my insights can allow us to pre-empt their failure modes and reduce the probability we repeat their mistakes.
  • I am not the ideal person for fundraising or networking or politics, though I have also tried my best to play these roles when absolutely necessary. If you are good at fundraising / networking / politics, you're probably a good fit for a cofounder.
  • I do not expert-level skills as a hacker. I am willing to learn some basic hacking skills, so that eventually we can hire people way better than us. I don't think I can become a world-expert-level hacker anytime soon even if I work hard, although I could probably get decent at it. I do still think my primary fit is generalist research and creating new ideas. Therefore, I am also open to a cofounder who is a hacker.
• My competencies based on my past projects
  • I also have a lot of first-hard experience that matches the Ray Dalio personality test results, so I trust them a lot more.
  • Projects I have completed in past, that I would count as successes
    • Cracking JEE
      • My strengths - hardcore physics/math, within a tight time constraint
    • Risk analyst at a cryptocurrency company
      • My strengths - generalist research role, quantitative aptitude, ability to learn basics of software/finance stuff on your own without guidance
    • US govt whistleblower guide and database - Relevant to this project
      • My strengths - can pay attention to detail if needed (though I do not, by default), generalist research, courage, ability to work solo
    • Some opsec / osint / cybersecurity writeups on my blog - Relevant to this project
      • My strengths - some general opsec skills, understanding of the failure modes of trying to do opsec solo
    • This blog
      • The primary goal of this blog was not to reach a large target audience, it was to help me get clarity on lot of things I was confused about. Reaching an audience was secondary goal.
      • My strengths - generalist research, ability to notice and resolve my own confusions, ability to work solo
    • Built random apps
      • I did not really put enough effort into converting any of them into a startup, so I would not consider lack of audience to be a failure on my part
      • My strengths - ability to learn basics of software / finance stuff on your own guidance, average UX skills
  • Projects I have completed in past, that I would not count as complete successes
    • Organised multiple protests against ASI
      • The protests were successful but I failed to get a large audience.
      • My strengths - courage
      • My weaknesses - ability to explain across large inferential distance in short span, ability to understand other people's worldviews either intellectually or via empathy, ability to sell myself or my ideas, ability to inspire people for a cause, ability to be diplomatic and not offend people, ability to look normal/professional/respectable
      • (I have non-zero skills in these too, I am just saying these are not my strengths)
    • Attempted running an anti-ASI youtube channel
      • My weaknesses - ability to create art, ability (or maybe willingness) to dumb myself down for average person, ability to understand what people care about, ability to understand other people's worldviews either intellectually or via empathy, ability to receive feedback from others, ability to hook people's attention in 30 seconds by selling myself or my ideas
    • Fundraising
      • I still haven't raised any significant funds, despite working on ASI risk for more than a year now. (Ask me in private for more details about this.)
      • My weaknesses - ability to be (or pretend to be) a trustworthy actor with high moral standards, ability to network with funders, ability to bridge the larger worldview gap that exists when it comes to indian VC or nonprofit funders, ability to sell myself

Where I expect to find such a cofounder

• I want to send this document (or some version of it) to lots of hackers and OSINT investigators (esp grey and blackhat), and doompill them using Yudkowsky's work. Can cold email attendee lists, can try to get warm intros, can meet in person.
• I want to send this document (or some version of it) to more people in EA/LW spaces, and blackpill them on the necessity of what is mentioned in this document. Same, can do cold emails, meet in person.
• I have observed that in-person is far better than online for discussing this, although I am open to either.

Risks involved in working with me

Disclaimer - I am not a lawyer, nor have I consulted one. There are legally grey areas here, and I don't know the actual boundary here. I am speculating based on what I've read.

If you are a citizen of US living in the US

• If you are a US citizen living in the US, you technically have first amendment rights to talk about literally anything except classified information. However classification is simply a legal tool, and there have been multiple instances of the US IC classifying information retroactively, to go and imprison people who leaked sensitive but not classified information.
• The US IC can sue you at any time for any reason whatsoever, with zero evidence. Expect to waste time and money if you get sued, even if you finally win.
• The US IC can start an investigation against you (and passively surveill you) at any time for any reason whatsoever, with zero evidence.
• If you demonstrate intent to leak classified information, this is intent to commit a crime. Obtaining warrants (such as to search your house, or interrogate you in person) likely requires proving you have atleast "intent to commit a crime". But this is also at the discretion of the judge, and the US IC obviously selects judges biased towards them, which gives them some leeway on what evidence counts as "intent".
• You can read about the FISA courts and their criticisms, for more on this whole topic.
• In short, I think even being associated with me for a few days is sufficient to prove "intent to commit crime" for the right judge, which is enough for the US IC to make your life significantly worse, but not enough to actually arrest you.

The only realistic way you can escape is to be considered incompetent, and hence not be considered a threat.

• Pursuing people is expensive in terms of time spent by an intelligence agency. Knowledge of methods, history, etc makes you competent and hence a threat. Connections with other competent people (like me) make you a threat. And so on.
• You are much more likely to be considered a threat if you have associated with me significantly, and I get arrested or involved in a high-profile situation later on. The actual consequences you face, for associating with me today, may be multiple years in the future.
• You are much more likely to be considered a threat if you actively encourage me, when discussing this topic with me, as opposed to just neutrally discussing it.

If you are a citizen of and living in US geopolitical sphere of influence (UK/EU/Canada/Australia/etc) but not US

• I don't know much about this, ask a lawyer.
• It is probably similar to the above, except that non-US citizens don't really have first amendment protections in the US (legally grey area), and your own country's legal protections may be weaker.

If you are a citizen of any other country, and living in US geopolitical sphere of influence (US/UK/EU/Canada/Australia/etc)

• In practice, you have no rights, and can be deported at any time for any dumb reason.

If you are a citizen of India living in India

• India almost never extradites to the US, even for serious crimes.
• I don't plan to break Indian law. I am only considering plans that break US/UK law.
• If you significantly associate with this project, you are likely to never get visa to a country in US geopolitical sphere of influence. The exact boundary is legally uncertain, and your visa can rejected at any time for any reason whatsoever.
• As mentioned above, the only realistic way you can escape is to be considered incompetent, and hence not a threat.

If you are a citizen of Russia living in Russia

• Russia has an active community of cyberhackers who hit US corporate and govt targets every year, with no legal repercussions.
• Russia almost never extradites to the US, even for serious crimes. (Exception - spies and political hostages can sometimes be traded by the Russian govt, in return for other favours.)
• I don't plan to break Russian law. I am only considering plans that break US/UK law.
• If you significantly associate with this project, you are likely to never get visa to a country in US geopolitical sphere of influence. The exact boundary is legally uncertain, and your visa can rejected at any time for any reason whatsoever.
• As mentioned above, the only realistic way you can escape is to be considered incompetent, and hence not a threat.

Opsec to follow, if you want to discuss this topic with me

• If the investigation is very minimal, some tricks like using disappearing messages on Signal could help. Also, make a mental note of who else in your social circle is aware of your plans. (I don't recommend actively disconnecting from loved ones, just to have a discussion with me. But, it is useful to atleast be aware of who all in your circle are aware.)
• If the investigation is thorough, expect to tell law enforcement everything you know. I don't think most people are capable of keeping any secrets from the intelligence agency of the same country whose soil they are living on. This is true whether the US IC is investigating you while you live in US, or Russian IC is investigating you while you live in Russia, or Indian IC is investigating you while you live in India, or Israeli IC is investigating you while you live in Israel, or any other country really.

Opsec to follow, if you want to work together

• If you really want to work together, beyond just a week or two of discussions, I honestly recommend flying and meeting me in-person.
• If you live within the US geopolitical sphere, it is important that you avoid telling people about the reason for flying here. There is a possibility our period of working together doesn't work out, and you may want to fly back to your country afterwards.
• If we seriously end up working together, we will also have to eventually figure out the best plan for your loved ones.

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