Yoshua Bengio on AI safety
From How to Keep AI From Going Off the Rails - AI Godfather Yoshua Bengio · · Nicholas Thompson and Atlantic Re:think
“The risk I saw is that we were on a path to build machines that would be intellectually at our level or superior to us in many different areas and that it would be like opening a Pandora's box. And furthermore that at least at that point we had no clue how we can make sure these neural nets would do the things we actually want because these are not like normal programs where a programmer decides oh in such and such circumstance the computer will behave this way. No you don't get to decide this. You only like give it experience and then you get what you get.”
On , Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director at Mila, spoke about AI safety during How to Keep AI From Going Off the Rails - AI Godfather Yoshua Bengio on Nicholas Thompson and Atlantic Re:think.
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.