Yoshua Bengio on AI power
From Fireside Chat with Prof. Yoshua Bengio | 2026 Copenhagen Summit · · Common Sense Media
“As those systems become more and more intelligent, they become more powerful. So the question is who controls that power? And there are a few bad options, right? It's concentrated in the hands of a few CEOs. It's concentrated in the hands of two governments and that's not good for geopolitics. That's not even good for our economies because if things continue at the current rate our economies in a few years will be completely dependent on AI as let's say right now it is dependent on oil and if there are two countries in the world who control this resource they will basically call the shots.”
On , Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director at Mila, spoke about AI power during Fireside Chat with Prof. Yoshua Bengio | 2026 Copenhagen Summit on Common Sense Media.
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.