Ray Kurzweil builds an AI replica meant to speak for him after death

Ray Kurzweil, a 78-year-old futurist, and his company Kurzweil Technologies partnered with Praxis AI to launch RAI on July 6, 2026, an artificial-intelligence replica of Kurzweil intended to talk, think, learn from interactions and continue conversing after his death. RAI went live on July 10, 2026, during Kurzweil’s Center Stage talk at the United Nations’ AI for Good Global Summit. The firms say it draws on six decades of his writing, interviews and personal memories, including 11 of his books, and runs on an undisclosed Google language model. Praxis claims a review layer keeps accuracy above 97%, but no independent evaluation of RAI has been published.