Note: These are all rough numbers, I'd expect I'd shift substantially about all of this on further debate.

Suppose we made humanity completely robust to biorisk, i.e. we did sufficient preparation such that the risk of bio catastrophe (including AI mediated biocatastrophe) was basically 0.^[1] How much would this reduce total x-risk?

The basic story for any specific takeover path not mattering much is that the AIs, conditional on them being wanting to take over, will self-improve until they find they find the next easiest takeover path and do that instead. I think that this is persuasive but not fully because:

1. AIs need to worry about their own alignment problem, meaning that they may not be able to self improve in an unconstrained fashion. We can break down the possibilities into (i) the AIs are aligned with their successors (either by default or via alignment being pretty easy), (ii) the AIs are misaligned with their successors but they execute a values handshake, or (iii) the AIs are misaligned with their successors (and they don't solve this problem or do a values handshake). At the point of full automation of the AI R&D process (which I currently think of as the point at which AIs become more useful than humans for making AI progress, i.e., if we remove all AIs, progress slows by more than if we remove the humans), conditional on the AIs being misaligned, I currently think the relative likelihood of (i), (ii) and (iii) is 1:1:3, and the probability flows from (iii) into (ii) and (i) as the AIs get smarter.^[2]
2. Raising the capability threshold that the AIs need to takeover gives humanity more time. During this time, we might make alignment progress or notice that the AIs are misaligned and slow down / pause / add mitigations.

So it might be important for misaligned AIs to attempt a takeover early in the intelligence explosion. Specifically, we can ask "how much x-risk is averted if the probability of misaligned AI takeover before TED AI goes to 0?", which attempts to capture all the worlds in which AIs attempt to takeover before TED AI. I think my overall risk reduction is something like 1/4. In other words, there's something like a 3/4 chance the AIs lurk (and can goal guard or align successors), or can backdoor successors, or control their successors.

Now, conditional on the pre-TED AIs attempting to takeover, what are the different routes that they might use? The most salient options to me are:

• Bioweapon, then outcompete rest of humanity (e.g. via robots or human cultists)
• Political operation / persuasion to quickly capture labs / govts (sufficient to prevent them from building other AIs while retaining your ability to foom in the future, once you've solved alignment, and to prevent safety research from happening that could expose you).
• Macro-scale robot uprising (e.g. with drones / humanoid robots).
• Nanotech
• Other exotic tech / unknown unknowns.

I think the bio path seems to me to be the most compelling path here by a fair amount; it maybe gets another 1/3 probability of this outcome. So, just from the risk of pre-TED AI AIs attemptinng to takeover, we have somehting like 1/3 * 1/4 = 1/12 probability. If you multiply that by my likelihood of AI takeover, which is around 70%, you get ~6% risk flowing from this route. Then, I update up to ~8% from other AIs, e.g. post-TED AIs relying on biorisk as a route to takeover.

So my overall view on how much x-risk flows through bio-catastrophe is around 8%.

1. ^{^}

   Note that what exactly counts as a bio x-risk is slightly unclear, e.g. at some point the AIs can build drones / nanotech to get into the bio-bunkers, and it's unclear what counts.

2. ^{^}

   This breakdown isn't exhaustive, because another salient possibility is that the AIs are clueless, e.g., they are misaligned with their successors but don't realize it, similar to Agent 3 in AI 2027.