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The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that conducts research and public outreach intended to help prevent human extinction from the development of artificial superintelligence (ASI). Founded in 2000 by Eliezer Yudkowsky, Brian Atkins, and Sabine Atkins as the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, the organization originally focused on accelerating AI development before pivoting in 2005 to focus on identifying and managing existential risks from superintelligent AI systems.

In 2005 the institute moved from Atlanta to Silicon Valley and began to focus on ways to identify and manage risks from superintelligent AI, which were at the time largely ignored by scientists in the field. Starting in 2006, the institute organized the Singularity Summit to discuss the future of AI including its risks, initially in cooperation with Stanford University and with funding from Peter Thiel. MIRI's launch of LessWrong in 2009 under Yudkowsky's direction created a platform for discussing rationality techniques and AI risks. In January 2013, the institute rebranded as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute after…

MIRI believes that the default outcome of building artificial superintelligence is human extinction, and that technical alignment research alone is unlikely to succeed in time to prevent this. Their current theory of change centers on policy intervention: by communicating the extreme risks of ASI to policymakers, the public, and AI developers, MIRI aims to build support for a globally coordinated and collectively enforced moratorium on the development of ASI. In parallel, their technical governance research explores verification mechanisms for international agreements, limitations of current AI evaluation methods, and frameworks for AI governance that could reduce catastrophic risk. In the long term, MIRI hopes to see AI-empowered projects used to avert major AI mishaps while humanity develops the scientific and institutional maturity needed to make lasting decisions about the far future.