Yoshua Bengio on AI arms race
From Yoshua Bengio: Towards an International Consensus on AI Risks and Safety · · Concordia AI
“There's really a danger of an arm race between different countries and AI could become a weapon, something used in the military starting with cyber but potentially in other weapons. And so we really need to start right now on international discussions to cooperate on safety but also to think about if there's going to be a treaty how do we make sure we get compliance verifiability.”
On , Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director at Mila, spoke about AI arms race during Yoshua Bengio: Towards an International Consensus on AI Risks and Safety on Concordia AI.
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.