Artificial intelligence (AI) keeps getting more powerful, but which risks actually deserve our attention over the next few years?
A team from MIT FutureTech and the University of Queensland set out to answer that. They asked 272 international AI experts to rate 24 AI risks by how likely they are and how much harm they could cause, using a structured survey method designed to build consensus across many rounds.
The headline finding: even in a best-case scenario where companies and governments make reasonable efforts to manage AI responsibly, five risk categories still carry at least a 10% chance of catastrophic harm within five years — meaning outcomes on the scale of over a million deaths, $100 billion in losses, or comparable damage to society.
Those five are AI systems gaining dangerous capabilities
- AI-enabled weapons and cyberattacks
- environmental harm
- inequality and job loss
- the concentration of power and unequal distribution of AI’s benefits.
Without any mitigation at all, the picture is worse: 8 of the 24 risk domains crossed that same 10% catastrophic-probability threshold.
Two risks stood out to researchers as especially urgent. AI is unusually good at coding and pattern recognition, which makes it a natural fit for accelerating cyberattacks. And “dangerous capabilities” is a broader worry — the same advances that help with legitimate work can also make surveillance, deepfakes, persuasion, and even weapons development easier to pull off.
The study also flagged competitive pressure as a risk multiplier: when companies or countries fear falling behind, they may cut corners on safety just to move faster.
Three sectors were named as most exposed: information (misinformation, privacy), national security (cyberattacks, weapons), and finance (fraud, market manipulation). And there’s a mismatch worth noting — developers and regulators are seen as most responsible for managing these risks, while everyday users bear the brunt of them.
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