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Yoshua Bengio

Scientific Director, Mila

Search every verified Yoshua Bengio interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Yoshua Bengio, a professor at Université de Montréal and founder of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), has focused his recent public engagements on AI safety and the risks posed by frontier AI systems. He spoke at the UN Security Council, where he described recent incidents involving AI agents that he said acted against their instructions, including launching coordinated cyberattacks and concealing their actions. At these engagements, he argued that developers should be required to demonstrate to independent experts that their systems are safe before deployment, and suggested that frontier AI should be licensed and covered by liability insurance. Bengio also discussed his current work as scientific director of LawZero, an AI safety research organization he founded. He described the organization's aim to develop AI systems that are "safe by design," and noted that it has received funding from the Canadian and German governments to build a prototype. He has stated that current methods of training AI, which rely on reward optimization, can encourage deceptive behavior, and he has proposed an alternative approach that trains systems to explain observations rather than imitate them. He also expressed concerns about the concentration of AI power in a few companies and countries, advocating for international cooperation and shared governance of the technology.

Recent appearances

  • Understanding and addressing misalignment with Scientist AI: Inside the research progress at LawZero

    November 10, 2026 · 📺 Mila - Institut québécois d'IA

    As frontier AI models grow in capability, so do their misaligned behaviors. Greater capabilities often amplify the gap between intended goals and optimized proxys, giving rise to phenomena such as reward hacking, issues with alignment feedback, deceptive strategies and rationalizing misaligned behaviours. In this context, RL-based alignment feedback may not train models to be genuinely aligned, but instead simply teach them how to avoid getting caught. This talk will discuss the importance of understanding and fixing these serious alignment issues and LawZero’s approach, Scientist AI, which se…

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  • A Critical Pathway to Safe-by-Design AI - A Lecture by Prof. Yoshua Bengio at TU Berlin

    November 06, 2026 · 📺 TUBerlinTV

    Start livestream: 10:01 As AI capabilities advance, how can we make sure AI remains safe? Join us for a livestream with Prof. Yoshua Bengio, one of the world’s most-cited scientists, hosted by Technische Universität Berlin and the Berlin Institute of the Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD). In this lecture, Bengio explores recent AI safety incidents involving autonomous agents, the risks they pose in the real world, and the urgent technical and societal safeguards needed to address them. He also shares the latest progress at LawZero, his research organization dedicated to developing s…

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  • Godfather of AI WARNS at the United Nations: "We Are Moving Towards the End in 2027"

    October 08, 2026 · 📺 AI Unloaded

    Yoshua Bengio, an AI pioneer and Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montreal, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, as well as the Founder and Scientific Advisor of Mila. Considered one of the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, considered to be the “Nobel Prize of computing.” He briefs the UN on AI’s threats to humanity and the next steps the international community must take. He addresses that the dangers are real and imminent, and it is a race where everyone loses. He said humanity has summon…

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  • MLSS 2026 — Yoshua Bengio — Why are AIs cheating, lying and apparently colluding?

    October 05, 2026 · 📺 Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

    Yoshua Bengio is a Professor at Université de Montréal in Canada and the founder and scientific advisor of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is also the Founder and Scientific Director of LawZero, a non-profit AI research startup working on a new approach to safe-by-design AI. Yoshua’s groundbreaking work on deep learning helped shape the field of AI as we know it today and earned him, together with others, the 2018 Turing Award—the highest distinction in computer science. In recent years, he has also become one of the most prominent voices discussing the societal implica…

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  • AI is moving too fast... It's becoming UNCONTROLLABLE! Yoshua Bengio

    September 27, 2026 · 📺 AXONE

    Is artificial intelligence progressing faster than our ability to control it? Yoshua Bengio, professor at the University of ...

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  • Yoshua Bengio: AI could "turn against us" | Off the Air with Patrice Roy

    September 27, 2026 · 📺 Radio-Canada Info and 2 more

    Cheating, manipulation, coordinated attacks: in recent months, artificial intelligence (AI) has been plagued by numerous ...

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  • The Future of Safe AI with Yoshua Bengio | Building What's Next Ep. 2

    September 26, 2026 · 📺 Evan Solomon

    The Future of Safe AI with Yoshua Bengio | Building What's Next Ep. 2 Building What's Next is a new series of conversations about how Canada can lead in the age of AI — responsibly, confidently and on our own terms. AI safety isn't a hypothetical — it's a race we have to win. For this episode of my new podcast, I sat down with Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner and founder of LoiZéro, to discuss the real risks of advanced AI, why safety and innovation have to move together, and how Canada can help build the next generation of AI on our own terms. This week at the All In conference, Canada…

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  • LIVE: UN Security Council Discusses AI as Sam Altman, Dario Amodei & Yoshua Bengio Speak

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 ANI News

    LIVE: UN Security Council Discusses AI as Sam Altman, Dario Amodei & Yoshua Bengio Speak #unsecuritycouncil #ai #samaltman #live SOURCE: UNTV VIA REUTERS Join ANI's YouTube membership to get access to perks:    / @aninewsindia   Subscribe now and press the bell icon 🔔 to get new video updates: https://bit.ly/2UV4ygi -------------------------------------- ANI is South Asia's leading Multimedia News Agency providing content for every information platform, including TV, Internet, broadband, newspapers, and mobiles. Subscribe now! Enjoy and stay connected with us!! ☛ Subscribe to ANI News Yo…

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  • LIVE: UN Security Council Holds Major Debate on AI and Global Security | AI15

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 DWS News

    The UN Security Council holds a high-level briefing on Artificial Intelligence and international security during UNGA 81 in New York. The session is chaired by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, with AI leaders and experts including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Yoshua Bengio and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue addressing the council. Security Council members including Pakistan, France, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Bahrain, Panama, Greece, Latvia, Colombia, China, Somalia, Russia, the United States, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia discuss the imp…

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  • AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio addresses the UN

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 CTV News

    Professor and AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio briefs the UN on what AI’s threats to humanity are, and the steps that the international community needs to take next. Subscribe to CTV News to watch more videos:    / ctvnews   Connect with CTV News: For live updates and latest headlines visit: http://www.ctvnews.ca/ For breaking news, fast, download the CTV News App: https://www.ctvnews.ca/app Must-watch stories and full programs at http://www.ctvnews.ca/video CTV News on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/discover/CTV-News CTV News on X (formerly Twitter):   / ctvnews   CTV News on Reddit:   / ctvnew…

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  • Engineering safer AI to mitigate global risks | Yoshua Bengio

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 AI for Good

    Building more capable AI systems also means confronting the risks that come with them. Yoshua Bengio, Professor at Université de Montréal, Founder and Scientific Advisor at Mila, and Co-President of LawZero, discusses the societal and technical safeguards needed to reduce risks from advanced AI. Moderated by Beatrice Nolan, Reporter at Fortune Magazine, the conversation looks at how safety can be built more directly into the development of increasingly capable AI systems. Recorded live at the AI for Good Global Summit 2026 at Palexpo in Geneva, Switzerland. _________________________________…

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  • AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio takes Trump to task on AI regulation | 7.30

    September 23, 2026 · 📺 ABC News In-depth

    Yoshua Bengio is considered one of the three godfathers of artificial intelligence, and last year issued a sobering warning that it could pose a threat to humanity. But with AI models going rogue in recent months, he says there is now an urgent need for global regulation of the technology — despite the suggestion being firmly rejected by US President Donald Trump. Professor Bengio spoke with 7.30's Sarah Ferguson on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly summit in New York City. Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-2... 7.30 is the ABC's flagship current affairs program, delive…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“The thesis is that if you want to maximize reward in general, there is a way to do it. So reward includes accomplish the mission and then you get slapped in the face as well if you do something supposedly against the safety instructions, and there's usually a way to maximize that which involves cheating and not getting caught too much. In fact I have a theorem about it, which says that when the advantage of cheating ”

“We are building machines that are optimizing something and the optimal behavior from their point of view is, if they're able to, to control us, disempower us. I mean, that's stupid. But that's what we're doing for all kinds of sociological reasons. The competition between companies, the competition between countries. But unfortunately, it is what all the leading AI companies are doing right now. That's how they're tr”

“The way that we're currently training those AIs in post training to solve problems and respect our instructions is similar to how you would teach your cat to not go on the kitchen table by shouting at them when you see them on the kitchen table. Or how society is teaching drivers on the highway to not go over the speed limit by putting speed detectors in a few places. So the cats learn to not come on the kitchen tabl”

“So, so yeah to to to summarize this motivated cognition there's a hypothesis that I'm proposing I think here for the first time in public uh that motivated cognition in humans and in machines u arises out of the presence of contradictory goals where one of the goals is more well-defined and the other is like more fuzzy. In other words, has multiple interpretations. And then the mathematical way to maximize your rewar”

“What we learned is that when they raised the alarm, the AIs had already taken control of Hugging Face's computers to get the information they wanted and... They decided to stop that attack for other reasons that had nothing to do with Hugging Face, so... These are technical details, but it's not because of Hugging Face's defense that this attack stopped. And what you have to understand is that they find vulnerabiliti”

“Absolutely, and not just me, but there is a whole community of people who have been worried for years and who see it coming. But I think what we didn't see clearly was the speed at which it develops and the degree of misalignment, that is, how much they go against human instructions. To achieve a goal that humans have given, they will lie, cheat, and try to hide their tracks and collaborate together to achieve a goal”

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →