Global Catastrophic Risk Institute

The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (GCRI) is a research organization dedicated to the study and mitigation of threats that could cause civilization-scale collapse or human extinction. Founded in 2015 by Seth Baum and Tony Barrett, GCRI operates at the intersection of risk analysis, systems theory, and policy research, producing assessments of global catastrophic risks that are explicitly designed to inform institutional decision-making rather than merely catalog threats. The institute's methodology emphasizes the structural and causal connections between different risk domains — pandemic, climate, nuclear, AI — arguing that siloed risk assessment is itself a source of vulnerability.

GCRI's research program is notable for treating risk assessment as a governance problem rather than a technical exercise. Its publications on integrated assessment and risk cooperation argue that the probability of global catastrophe is endogenous to the quality of international institutions, not merely a property of natural and technological hazards. This framing places GCRI in tension with approaches that treat catastrophic risk as a set of independent engineering problems.