Viral tweet claimed Altman, Amodei led "Superintelligence" thanks — archive shows otherwise

A post by Nikolas Ioannou spread rapidly over the weekend asserting that the 2014 edition of Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" lists Sam Altman and Dario Amodei as the first two names in its acknowledgments, 18 months before OpenAI was founded. A Community Note on X linked to the original scan on archive.org, which shows the first edition opens with Ross Andersen, a journalist and editor who interviewed Bostrom over the years. Altman and Amodei do not appear in the acknowledgments at all.

The book, "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies," was published by Oxford University Press in 2014 and became a foundational text in AI risk discourse. Ioannou quoted a list of roughly a hundred names and claimed the first two were Altman and Amodei, implying an early connection to Bostrom before they founded OpenAI and Anthropic respectively. The tweet was shared hundreds of times and cited as evidence of the pair's early engagement with alignment and AI safety.

Checking the scanned first edition tells a different story. The relevant page begins with Andersen's name. The Community Note included a direct link to the archive page and debunked the claim within hours. As of publication, Ioannou has not issued a correction or clarification.

Historical context: in 2014 Altman was already running Y Combinator, while Amodei was at Google Brain working on deep-learning research. Both moved in Bostrom's orbit — Altman even hosted him for a lecture series at YC — but there is no evidence they contributed to the writing or editing of the book in a way that would warrant prime placement in the acknowledgments. OpenAI was founded in December 2015, about 18 months after the book's release, as Ioannou correctly noted; the causal link he tried to draw between the acknowledgments and the founding does not hold.

The episode illustrates how quickly a convenient narrative — "the future founders were there from the start" — spreads without basic verification. On a platform where Community Notes are the last line of defense against misinformation, the correction arrived relatively fast, but not before the original tweet amassed wide exposure. For researchers and journalists in the field, it is a reminder: when a book quote looks too good to be true, open the scanned page before you share it.