EVENT
Statement on Superintelligence
The October 2025 Future of Life Institute statement calling for a conditional prohibition on superintelligence development—not to be lifted until scientific consensus on safety and strong public buy-in are established.
The Statement on Superintelligence was issued in October 2025 by the Future of Life Institute, marking the furthest escalation in Tegmark's policy trajectory. It called for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence—AI substantially exceeding human cognitive performance across essentially every domain—that would remain in place until two conditions were met: broad scientific consensus that such development could proceed safely and controllably, and strong public buy-in from the populations that would be affected. The Statement represented a qualitative departure from the 2023 Pause Letter's six-month moratorium framing. Where the Pause Letter sought time for safety research to catch up, the Statement asserted that time alone would not suffice—that superintelligence development must be foreclosed until specific, demanding conditions are satisfied.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The escalation was deliberate calibration. Each Tegmark-led policy intervention—the 2017 Asilomar Principles, the 2023 Pause Letter, the 2025 Statement—was calibrated to the capability landscape at the time of articulation, and each was