“Top-human-expert dominating AI by the end of 2026: 5%. This means an AI system that achieves ambitious long-term goals in any domain better than the world's leading expert in that domain, using a comparable amount of time and cost. The main pathway I see to this is automation of AI R&D sometime in mid-2026 → rapid intelligence explosion → TEDAI by end of year.”

Cotra restated this ~5% figure when rescoring her forecasts in August 2026.