Kokotajlo studied at the
University of Notre Dame, where he graduated with a BA in philosophy in 2014. He went on to study philosophy in graduate school at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he obtained an MA in 2017 under the supervision of John Thomas Roberts. During his PhD study in philosophy at
Chapel Hill, he was a recipient of the 2018–2019 Maynard Adams Fellowship for the Public Humanities. In 2022, he became a researcher in the governance division of OpenAI. When he resigned in 2024, he refused to sign
OpenAI's non-disparagement clause, which could have cost him approximately $2 million in equity. In June 2024, he, with other former OpenAI employees, signed a letter arguing that top frontier AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid oversight, and calling for a "right to warn" about AI risks without fear of reprisal and while protecting anonymity. In 2021, Kokotajlo wrote a blog post named "What 2026 Looks Like". In 2025,
Kevin Roose commented that "A number of his predictions proved prescient." He cofounded and leads the
AI Futures Project, a nonprofit based in
Berkeley, California which researches the future impact of artificial intelligence. In April 2025, it released
AI 2027, a detailed forecast scenario predicting rapid progress in the automation of coding and AI research, followed by AGI. It laid out a scenario in which fully autonomous AI agents will be better than humans at "everything" around the end of 2027, imagining its impacts on the economy, domestic politics and international relations. == References ==