GCRI is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that analyzes the risk of events that could significantly harm or even destroy human civilization at the global scale.
Featured Publication
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Earth-Cosmos Binary
What should be done with the cosmos? This paper, published in the journal Futures, provides the rough contours of an answer: an Earth-Cosmos Binary (ECB). An ECB preserves Earth, plus a region surrounding Earth, in more-or-less its current form, while letting the rest of the cosmos be transformed into something that may be radically superior.
Recent Commentaries
AI Risk and Strategy, Early 2026
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The Iran War and Global Catastrophic Risk
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Ukraine and Nuclear War, 2026
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Political Orders and Global Catastrophic Risk
The GCRI Symposium on World Peace
World peace and global catastrophic risk are two large global issues with significant overlap. Some war scenarios could result in global catastrophe, especially nuclear war. The geopolitical rivalries that can lead to wars also inhibit international cooperation on a wide range of global catastrophic risks. A world at peace may be substantially more effective at reducing global catastrophic risk. But what should that mean in practice, both for the field of global catastrophic risk and for society at large? To address this question, the GCRI Symposium on World Peace brings together experts who present diverse perspectives on world peace and what should be done about it.
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Introduction to the GCRI Symposium on World Peace
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From Danger to Renewal: Rethinking Crisis Through a Cyclical Lens
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Responsible Cosmopolitan Leadership to Advance Peace and Reduce Catastrophic Risk
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An International Dialogue among Catastrophic Risk Researchers
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A Critique of the Goal of World Peace
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Concepts for Advancing Peace
Recent Research
Climate Change, Uncertainty, and Global Catastrophic Risk
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Assessing the Risk of Takeover Catastrophe from Large Language Models
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On the Intrinsic Value of Diversity
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Manipulating Aggregate Societal Values to Bias AI Social Choice Ethics
From the Archive
2020 Survey of Artificial General Intelligence Projects for Ethics, Risk, and Policy
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Long-Term Trajectories of Human Civilization
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A Model for the Probability of Nuclear War
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The Far Future Argument for Confronting Catastrophic Threats to Humanity: Practical Significance and Alternatives
GCRI conducts interdisciplinary research across the global catastrophic risks, with emphasis on ten topics.
GCRI Topics
Concern about AI catastrophe has existed for many decades. It has recently become a lightning rod for debate alongside the growing societal prominence of AI technology. GCRI’s AI research helps to ground the discussion in the underlying character of the risk and develop solutions that help across a range of AI issues. GCRI is also active in AI ethics, providing perspective on the question of what values to build into AI systems.
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Human civilization emerged during the Holocene, which for 10,000 years has brought relatively stable and favorable environmental conditions. Now, human activity is threatening those conditions, causing climate change, biodiversity loss, ecosystem destruction, and more. GCRI’s research assesses the global catastrophic risk posed by these environmental changes and advances practical solutions to reduce the risk.
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Instead of thinking in terms of specific global catastrophic risks in isolation from each other, it is often better to think holistically about the entirety of global catastrophic risk. This includes interconnections between the risks and actions that can affect multiple risks. GCRI was specifically founded as an organization dedicated to studying the whole of global catastrophic risk and this remains a priority for GCRI’s ongoing work.
Global catastrophic risk is clearly a major ethical issue, though there are many views on how much to prioritize the risk and what to do about it. GCRI’s ethics research seeks to clarify the ethical foundations of global catastrophic risk and clarify the relation between global catastrophic risk and other issues. This research aims to guide actions to address global catastrophic risk while accounting for related issues.
The world still possess about 10,000 nuclear warheads, enough to cause massive global devastation. As long as adversarial relations between nuclear-armed countries persist, there will be some chance of escalation to nuclear war. To help address the risk, GCRI contributes risk analysis of the probability and severity of nuclear war and solutions for reducing the risk, especially for global effects such as nuclear winter.
Global catastrophic risk may be of astronomical significance: a global catastrophe could prevent Earth-originating civilization from expanding into the cosmos. Additionally, there are threats from outer space to life on Earth, such as asteroids and space weather. GCRI’s research relates global catastrophic risk to the fate of the universe and analyzes space-based risks in terms of their potential for global catastrophe.
Pandemics have caused many of the most severe events in human history, COVID-19 included. Modern biotechnology can help reduce the risk while also creating new risks. GCRI’s research on pandemics and biorisk applies risk and decision analysis techniques and relates the risks to the broader domain of global catastrophic risk. GCRI has been less active on this topic but it remains an important domain to address.
Global catastrophic risk is defined by its extreme severity. The severity has two major components: the resilience of human civilization to global catastrophes and, if civilization collapses, how successfully the survivors would recover. Both of these components have been alarmingly understudied. GCRI’s research assesses the severity of global catastrophes and assesses opportunities to mitigate them.
Decision analysis can help to identify decision options and their consequences, including their effect on risks. Risk analysis can characterize potential harms and quantify them in terms of their probability and severity. GCRI applies risk and decision analysis methods to global catastrophic risk. GCRI’s approach balances between the value of quantitative analysis and the pitfalls of quantifying deeply uncertain parameters.
To successfully reduce global catastrophic risk, it is necessary to formulate solutions that would reduce the risk if implemented and that will actually be implemented. This often involves engaging with people and institutions that may not have global catastrophic risk as a priority. GCRI’s research develops solutions that account for the priorities of the relevant decision-makers to achieve significant reductions in the risk.
Founded in 2011, GCRI is one of the oldest active organizations working on global catastrophic risk. We provide intellectual and moral leadership to support the broader field of global catastrophic risk.
About GCRI
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The GCRI team is led by senior experts in the field of global catastrophic risk.
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