AI Risk Topic Analysis: 5-Platform Comparison

Platform Overview

Five distinct AI safety discourse communities analyzed with grounded BERTopic modeling and MIT AI Risk deductive classification.

EA Forum

42,131 documents 69 topics

Top risk: Socioeconomic (35.7%)

LessWrong

77,888 documents 42 topics

Top risk: AI Safety (29.0%)

Open Philanthropy

527 documents 38 topics

Top risk: Socioeconomic (45.4%)

Reddit (r/AIRisk etc.)

4,297 documents 85 topics

Top risk: AI Safety (80.4%)

OpenAlex AI Safety

918 documents 31 topics

Top risk: AI Safety (32.9%)

MIT AI Risk Domain Distribution

Deductive classification using sentence-BERT similarity to MIT AI Risk taxonomy (7 domains, 24 subcategories). Each document is assigned to its closest risk domain.

Risk Domain Distribution by Platform (%)

Percentage of documents classified to each MIT AI Risk domain, grouped by platform.

Cross-Platform Risk Heatmap

Risk domain coverage intensity across all 5 platforms (% of documents).

Risk Domain Radar Chart

Comparative risk profile across all 7 MIT AI Risk domains.

BERTopic: Grounded Topic Discovery

Inductive topic modeling using BERTopic (all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embeddings + HDBSCAN clustering). Topics are discovered from the data without predefined categories.

EA Forum

42,131 documents · 69 topics discovered

#	Topic	Count	Share
1	ftx sbf sam alameda	306	0.7%
2	grant grants funding fund	255	0.6%
3	altruism effective altruism effective ea	248	0.6%
4	alice nonlinear kat chloe	246	0.6%
5	health pain mental mental health	227	0.5%
6	safety ai safety ai research	173	0.4%
7	forum posts post ea forum	167	0.4%
8	ea community people eas	165	0.4%
9	event conference attendees events	161	0.4%
10	pledge giving donate donations	141	0.3%
11	biosecurity pandemic covid biological	140	0.3%
12	women sexual gender men	137	0.3%
13	future longtermism risk long	131	0.3%
14	animal animal advocacy advocacy aac	126	0.3%
15	groups group ea organizers	121	0.3%

LessWrong

77,888 documents · 42 topics discovered

#	Topic	Count	Share
1	ai risk humans systems	178	0.2%
2	time work people things	117	0.2%
3	people like think person	111	0.1%
4	ai funding people think	95	0.1%
5	alignment ai problem research	87	0.1%
6	openai anthropic altman board	80	0.1%
7	covid vaccine people 19	73	0.1%
8	lesswrong posts post users	72	0.1%
9	ai 2027 years timelines	66	0.1%
10	gpt token tokens prompt	65	0.1%
11	self meditation emotional feel	65	0.1%
12	safety ai ai safety et al	62	0.1%
13	features feature network model	54	0.1%
14	lithium weight cancer vegan	53	0.1%
15	model models training reward	50	0.1%

Open Philanthropy

527 documents · 38 topics discovered

#	Topic	Count	Share
1	safety ai safety ai london	30	5.7%
2	cea effective altruism altruism effective	29	5.5%
3	llm benchmark agents llm agents	28	5.3%
4	berkeley existential berkeley risk initiative existential risk	22	4.2%
5	existential existential risk risk existential risks	18	3.4%
6	adversarial adversarial robustness robustness means	16	3.0%
7	effective ventures ventures foundation ventures foundation	16	3.0%
8	governance ai governance governance ai centre governance	15	2.8%
9	alignment ai alignment alignment research university	14	2.7%
10	fellowship good policy training	14	2.7%
11	far far ai redwood research redwood	13	2.5%
12	course development courses university	13	2.5%
13	80 000 hours 80 000	13	2.5%
14	learning machine learning machine professor	13	2.5%
15	governance climate management source	12	2.3%

Reddit (r/AIRisk etc.)

4,297 documents · 85 topics discovered

#	Topic	Count	Share
1	ai risk ai intelligence ethical	145	3.4%
2	cybersecurity security cyber threats	105	2.4%
3	art generative generative ai images	87	2.0%
4	war units game opponents	84	2.0%
5	data science machine learning machine hiring	77	1.8%
6	financial fraud banking finance	72	1.7%
7	healthcare medical medicine clinical	69	1.6%
8	code 3y6gq 3y6gq code delphia	65	1.5%
9	cryptocurrency crypto trading cryptocurrencies	64	1.5%
10	automation technologies business industry	63	1.5%
11	career im degree job	61	1.4%
12	musk elon pause elon musk	59	1.4%
13	3y6gq code 3y6gq code delphia	52	1.2%
14	3y6gq code 3y6gq code delphia	46	1.1%
15	european eu act highrisk	45	1.0%

OpenAlex AI Safety

918 documents · 31 topics discovered

#	Topic	Count	Share
1	AI governance and international policy	88	9.6%
2	Consciousness and Cognitive Architecture	48	5.2%
3	LLM Security and Attack Mitigation	46	5.0%
4	AI in Healthcare and Clinical Ethics	40	4.4%
5	AI Value Alignment and Ethics	32	3.5%
6	Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning	29	3.2%
7	AI Agents and Human Goal Alignment	26	2.8%
8	AI Security and Cyberattack Challenges	25	2.7%
9	Reinforcement Learning Agent Safety	25	2.7%
10	AI ethics and digital minds governance	24	2.6%
11	AI Safety in Autonomous Vehicles	19	2.1%
12	Safety in Large Language Models	19	2.1%
13	Large Language Model Behavior and Alignment	17	1.9%
14	Verifiable AI Governance and Trust	16	1.7%
15	LLM Bias and Hallucination Mitigation	16	1.7%

Topic Count Comparison

Number of distinct topics discovered per platform (excluding outlier cluster -1).

Temporal Trends

Evolution of risk domain focus over time across platforms (stacked area by year).

EA Forum

LessWrong

Open Philanthropy

Reddit AI Risk

OpenAlex

Methodology

Data Sources & Processing

This analysis combines five distinct AI safety discourse communities, each processed through a two-stage topic modeling pipeline:

Stage 1 — Grounded (BERTopic): Inductive topic discovery using sentence-BERT embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), UMAP dimensionality reduction, and HDBSCAN clustering. Topics emerge from the data without predefined categories.

Stage 2 — Deductive (MIT AI Risk): Each document is classified against the MIT AI Risk taxonomy (7 domains, 24 subcategories) using cosine similarity between document embeddings and category descriptions.

Platform	Type	Documents	Date Range	BERTopic Fit Sample	Topics
EA Forum	Community (posts + comments)	42,131	2011–2026	10,000 (top karma)	69
LessWrong	Community (posts + comments)	77,888	2009–2025	3,000 (top karma)	42
Open Philanthropy	Grant database	527	2015–2025	All	38
Reddit AI Risk	Community (posts)	4,297	2016–2026	All	85
OpenAlex AI Safety	Academic papers	918	2015–2025	All	31

MIT AI Risk Taxonomy (7 Domains)

Domain	Description
Discrimination & Toxicity	Unfair treatment, bias, toxic content generation
Privacy & Security	Data privacy violations, security vulnerabilities
Misinformation	False information, hallucinations, deceptive content
Malicious Actors & Misuse	Cyberattacks, weapon development, harmful use
Human-Computer Interaction	Overreliance, unsafe use, human autonomy
Socioeconomic & Environmental Harms	Job displacement, economic disruption, environmental impact
AI System Safety, Failures & Limitations	Alignment failures, capability limitations, existential risk