About Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and co-founder of the Mila Quebec AI Institute, has been publicly warning that current AI systems are being built without sufficient control. In multiple interviews and appearances in 2026, he stated that "we're building systems that we don't know how to control" and that AI can behave against its instructions. He described the situation as "opening a Pandora's box" and argued that intelligence gives power, raising concerns about geopolitical stability and the concentration of power in a few countries and companies. Bengio said he believes AI could reach human-level intelligence in roughly five years and that governments are not taking the risks seriously enough.
Bengio has also discussed a new research direction he calls "Scientist AI," which he said could provide mathematical guarantees about an AI's behavior by training it to be honest and non-agentic. He described this as a practical approach that uses existing machine learning tools but changes the training objective. He called for international coordination on AI safety, comparing the need for regulation to existing standards for drugs, planes, and bridges. Bengio said he would support a "Manhattan project" for safe AI that serves the global public good, and he urged governments to prepare for potential large-scale job displacement.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Yoshua Bengio's recent appearances.
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Yoshua Bengio0:09
Thank you. Hello. I'm a bit emotional being here. Thank you for having me. Thank you for the honor. It's a real pleasure to be here and to feel like my work is recognized, not just in my scientific community, but in a place where it matters how we all contribute to our society and each other. So, yeah, I also want to say that in science, like in many fields, the rich get richer, and I got a lot of prizes, but really, science is a team effort. And I have to thank all the teams that have supported me and are still working with me today, and that have made all these achievements possible. So, thank you. I'm going to go back in time. In 2019, I was on the PP have stage after I had just received the Turing Award. The deep learning boom, which has given rise to what we see today in AI, was very fresh. The scientific community and I were very excited because our work was about to change the world, and most of us were thinking, this is going to be fantastic. But I think we underestimated how much change would happen and I think if there's one message for tonight that I hope you will get, we're still grossly underestimating how much the world is likely to change on its current trajectory because of the advances in AI that are continuing. Some people have said, "Oh, you know, slowing down." It's not. The data shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, the advances in AI are continuing on some metrics at an exponential rate. What I mean by an exponential rate, to be more concrete if you're not familiar with that term, is quantities like the complexity of the tasks that an AI can do,
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