Scenario update The authors move their own explosion date, and publish five plans instead of one
The AI Futures Project published AI-2040, its third major release after AI-2027 and the AI Futures Model, and it substantially reworks the earlier forecast. The default explosion date moves: in AI-2040 the scenario reaches fully automated AI R&D in 2030, not 2027. The narrative is explicit that this is the trajectory a deal is meant to prevent, "In 2030, we would have fully automated AI R&D, leading to superintelligence by the end of the year. Thanks to the deal, we avoid this." The three years between the two documents are filled in rather than skipped: AI agents at national scale and an AI Transparency Act in 2027, most white-collar professions disrupted and AI as the dominant election issue in 2028, and US-China negotiations opening in 2029. The bigger structural change is that AI-2040 stops being a single line. At the 2029 decision point it branches into five plans, and the document is largely an argument about which branch to take. Plan A, Verified Slowdown, is what they recommend: a verified international deal with total research transparency, scaling inside the human range from 2030 to 2035, a deliberate pause at top-human-expert level to keep control, then unpausing to superintelligence in 2040, the year that gives the document its name. The alternatives are Plan B, Fight China, sabotage up to large-scale kinetic attacks; Plan C, Burn the Lead, where the leading project spends some of its lead on safety; Plan D, Race to ASI, running the intelligence explosion at close to full speed with at least 1% of resources on safety; and Plan S, Shut it all down, an indefinite halt. They attach their own odds to each: Plan A at 72% aligned and 42% chance of a great future, down through Plan C at 40% and 20%, to Plan D at 25% and 10%. The plans are separated by very little time. Measured from the automated coder milestone, Plan D reaches takeover-capable AI in about 1.13 years and Plan C in about 1.5, which is why the document treats a few months of deliberate slowdown as the decisive variable rather than a marginal one. Alongside the scenario they publish an Incremental AI Policy Wishlist of six things that could be done now without any deal, which this tracker now scores against the documented record. Authors are Thomas Larsen, Romeo Dean, Daniel Kokotajlo, Ryan Greenblatt, Eli Lifland and Brendan Halstead. Plan A is a recommendation, not a forecast, and the distinction changes how it should be read. The AI-2040 landing page states that Plan A is primarily a recommendation rather than a prediction, and is not the authors' best guess about what will happen: the implementation is prescriptive, while the consequences depicted after implementation are conditional predictions. That means this tracker cannot score Plan A the way it scores AI-2027. The proposed interventions have to be graded separately from claims about what follows if those interventions occur, which is why the six policy asks below are tracked on their own rather than folded into the scenario lines. Richard Ngo, an advisor the AI Futures Project paid to develop critiques, argued at launch that the hybrid optimistic-forecast format obscures which outcomes are meant as desirable, realistic or illustrative. Caveat on our rendering: the authors publish dates, durations and probabilities, not capability curves. The five branch lines on the graph above are our drawing of their stated dates onto our scale.
▶ How this changes what we are tracking
AI-2040: 2029, Choose a Path
"In 2029, the US and China agree to avoid a reckless race to superintelligence." [The tracker previously measured reality against one line. From here it measures against a shared path to 2029 and five divergent branches after it, plus the six policy asks that are actionable now. The AI-2027 line stays on the chart: it is the earlier forecast from the same authors and watching it fall behind is part of the record.]