Do we like Yuval Noah Harari?
Our score: 8 out of 10. A clean record on harm and a decent one on character, marked down only because the file is thin on climate and a few other topics.
Harari is the Israeli historian who went from a Hebrew University lecture hall to global bestseller lists with Sapiens, and later Nexus, a book on information networks and AI. He is openly gay, and that shapes some of his public writing. If you only know him as the bloke on the Davos stage telling billionaires the robots are coming, there's a bit more to him.
The best window into his values is a 2019 Guardian essay marking 50 years since Stonewall, as reported by JTA. He warned that progress for LGBTQ+ people isn't guaranteed: “History rarely moves in a straight line.” He added that “violent homophobic backlashes are possible, even in the most liberal countries,” and pointed to gay people being scapegoated in places like Poland, Hungary and Russia.
He has also put his name behind his politics at some cost. In 2018 Calcalist, citing Ynet, reported that he turned down an invitation to work with Israel's consulate in Los Angeles. The report linked this to a surrogacy law that excluded gay men and the Nation-State Law, and his manager said Harari is proud to be Israeli but wanted no cooperation with the consulate. Since Oct 7, he has been a sharp critic of Benjamin Netanyahu, telling a 2024 New York event that Netanyahu “was trying to systematically destroy the institutions of Israeli democracy.” Whether you read that as a patriot's warning or as a pile-on depends on where you stand on Israeli politics.
When Iran banned the sale of his books in 2019, he answered on Twitter that “The Iranian regime fears free scientific inquiry.” He's also been on the receiving end of misrepresentation: in 2023 PolitiFact rated False a viral claim that the World Economic Forum wanted AI to rewrite the Bible. He had said AI could write a new Bible, not that it should, and he holds no leadership role at the WEF.
Nothing fresh or scandalous has turned up lately. His most recent big moment was Davos in January 2026, where, per a summary of his talk, he argued generative AI is now an agent rather than a tool and asked whether it should ever get legal personhood. Plenty of people find his AI predictions speculative, but that's an argument about ideas, not a harm.
On the harm test, we looked for anything against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, public health or the planet, and for the company he keeps. We found no harmful words or acts, and no worrying collaborators. The honest gap is that the sources we checked are quiet on climate, vaccines and trans issues specifically, so this is a clean pass rather than a gold star.