A personal letter on transformative AI

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A personal letter on transformative AI<br>Making sense of rapid AI progress

George Rosenfeld<br>May 15, 2026

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George Rosenfeld is Deputy Director for Global Catastrophic Risks at Coefficient Giving, which covers our Navigating Transformative AI and Biosecurity funds. In April, he wrote a letter to his friends and family about why he thinks AI could transform the world in the coming years, and why the current trajectory worries him.<br>It’s a personal letter, written for people who are encountering these arguments for the first time. We’re sharing it because we think more people should be having these kinds of conversations.<br>Note: this letter was shared at the start of April. In the roughly six weeks since, Anthropic’s annualized revenue has reportedly grown to $45 billion (up from the $9 billion figure in December 2025 cited below), and it announced the development of Mythos, a new powerful AI model that it claims was able to find security vulnerabilities in every major operating system and web browser when prompted. The letter doesn’t incorporate these developments, but AI progress continues at a blistering pace.

Dear family and friends,<br>For the past two years, I’ve worked at Coefficient Giving on the Navigating Transformative AI program. For the most part, our work involves thinking about what might happen with AI over the coming years, trying to get a sense of how powerful and transformative it might become, and doing whatever we can to help make the world more prepared.<br>The sorts of scenarios my team thinks about sound pretty extreme and sci-fi. We think about worlds where AI systems are able to do practically everything humans can do, just faster and better; where decades of scientific progress start to happen in months or years; and where we’re asking ourselves not just what AIs can do, but whether humanity can remain in the driver’s seat at all.<br>It’s hard to overstate how completely wild these possibilities are. If these outcomes are even somewhat plausible, then we may be living through one of the most important turning points in human history.<br>I don’t know for certain whether any of these things are going to happen. I also don’t know whether these things would be very good (think: unprecedented human flourishing), or very bad (think: all humans dead or disempowered), or somewhere in between.<br>I should also be upfront that these views are not mainstream.1 The idea that AI could automate nearly everything and transform civilization within a few years is a minority position, and one that most economists, policymakers, and people in general aren’t taking seriously yet. It certainly doesn’t feel like the world is awake to these possibilities.<br>I was personally skeptical for a long time too. When I first encountered these arguments, they sounded sci-fi and far off, and I took a while to come around. But over the last couple of years, my more conservative predictions have consistently underestimated how much progress AI would make, and I’ve become increasingly convinced – and increasingly worried — that these scenarios are plausible, and that they might not be far away.<br>I wasn’t sure whether to share this, whether it would even be a good thing for people to read. Although I’m uncertain, my best guess is that the world is on the cusp of changing radically — that we’ll look back at this period like we looked back on February 2020 before COVID-19 changed everything,2 except this time the transformation will be much more drastic and the world may never go back to how it was before.<br>These are real views that I live with, and that increasingly guide my emotions and decisions and hopes and fears. It feels strange, and lonely, to hold them and not share them with people I care about.<br>In what follows, I’ll write about (1) why powerful AI could be such a huge deal, (2) how quickly we could reach that point, and (3) what unprecedented risks — and benefits — transformative AI could introduce. I also link to further resources where you can learn from people much more knowledgeable than me.<br>Why is AI a big deal?

Most of us interact with AI as a chatbot, an online interface that answers our questions, plans our holidays, and occasionally does our homework.3 Sometimes it feels helpful, other times useless. Either way, it doesn’t necessarily feel that ground-breaking or that different to other technologies that humans have invented.<br>One key difference is that unlike previous technologies, it might be possible for AI to automate everything that humans can do. Previous technologies have always been a complement to humans in some way. The printing press let us spread ideas faster, but someone still had to have the ideas. Computers can calculate faster than we ever could, but they only do what we program them to do.<br>AI, by contrast, could plausibly do everything that humans can, including the open-ended thinking that used to be exclusively ours. We...