Yoshua Bengio on international cooperation
From AI Scientist Bengio on Engineering Safer Agents · · Bloomberg Live
“The US has to sit down with China. And of course, China feels the same. In fact, they feel even more because the leading models right now are in the US. So both have an interest to sit down at the table and agree. Our companies should evaluate those risks that are currently prominent like cyber for now. Eventually more things like bioweapons and not deploy in one form or another AIs that would allow these really dangerous uses.”
On , Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director at Mila, spoke about international cooperation during AI Scientist Bengio on Engineering Safer Agents on Bloomberg Live.
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.