Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse is an AI safety writer and researcher who went down the AI doom rabbit hole in 2023 and never came back up. After a year as digital communications officer at the UK AI Security Institute (AISI), she’s gone independent to speak her mind unfiltered.
Read Sarah’s Substack: https://longerramblings.substack.com
Join PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction in London on November 21: https://luma.com/pauseai-nov26
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDbHCKwuMrk
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:00:41 — Introducing Sarah Hastings-Woodhouse
00:02:06 — How a Humanities Grad Got AGI-Pilled
00:08:40 — Whose Timelines Do You Trust?
00:11:32 — Joining the UK AI Security Institute
00:15:47 — What AISI Actually Does
00:19:23 — Verifying Anthropic’s Mythos Claims
00:21:59 — Leaving Government to Speak Freely
00:23:22 — What’s Your P(Doom)?™
00:25:37 — Yudkowsky, EA, and Keeping Your Identity Small
00:32:08 — Is Anthropic Doing Enough to Call for a Slowdown?
00:35:56 — Can You Do AI Safety from Second Place?
00:39:20 — Hugging Face and the Vibe Shift
00:44:02 — Is Everything Weird Yet?
00:48:27 — Prevent Recursive Self-Improvement, Don’t Ban It
00:52:28 — Build the Speed Dial, Not the Pause Button
00:56:54 — Was Calling for a Pause in 2023 a Mistake?
01:01:22 — Turning Up the Fear Dial
01:04:23 — Donation Drive
01:05:11 — PauseAI UK’s March Against AI Extinction
Links
SARAH HASTINGS-WOODHOUSE
Sarah’s Substack
Sarah on X (@littIeramblings)
Consistently Candid — Sarah’s podcast
“What is recursive self-improvement and what would it mean to ban it?” — Sarah’s RSI post (Oct 1, 2026)
“Is everything weird yet?” (Aug 30, 2026)
“What the hell just happened?” — on AI safety’s viral moment (Sep 18, 2026)
“We have been warned” — the Hugging Face hack as a warning shot (Jul 27, 2026)
“The pause-shaped hole in ‘Policy on the AI Exponential’” — is Anthropic doing enough to call for a slowdown? (Jun 19, 2026)
Sarah’s 2023 thread on stumbling into the world of AI doom (“I’m angry because I love the world”)
“The other night I successfully AGI-pilled a man on a first date”
“Welcome, and also I’m sorry” — Sarah’s note to AI safety newcomers (Sep 11, 2026)
“‘We’re all f*cked and it’s totally hopeless’ is almost as bad of a meme to be spreading” (Feb 12, 2025)
REFERENCED IN THE EPISODE
“Our evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities” — AISI (Apr 13, 2026)
AISI Frontier AI Trends Report (Dec 2025)
“The levers of political persuasion with conversational AI” — AISI Human Influence team
US Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) — NIST
“Geoffrey Hinton tells us why he’s now scared of the tech he helped build” — MIT Technology Review (May 2023)
“We’re All Gonna Die with Eliezer Yudkowsky” — Bankless (2023)
“GPT-2 As Step Toward General Intelligence” — Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex (Feb 2019)
“AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities” — Eliezer Yudkowsky
“Keep Your Identity Small” — Paul Graham
Pacing the Frontier — the open letter signed by 1,300+ frontier lab employees
“You can’t do safety from second place” — Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s head of public policy (Sep 29, 2026)
Ezra Klein’s op-ed calling for a ban on recursive self-improvement — The New York Times (Sep 20, 2026)
“Banning self-recursive improvement in AI models?” — Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution (Sep 22, 2026)
PauseAI UK
March Against AI Extinction — PauseAI UK, London, November 21, 2026
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Top Economist Sees AI Doom Coming — Dr. Peter Berezin, BCA Research
Will AI Kill Everyone by 2050? Debate with Dr. Casey Hart (Ontology Explained)
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Transcript, links, and show notes: https://doomdebates.com/p/ai-has-become-profoundly-weird
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