Canadian computer scientist, deep learning pioneer. Won 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and LeCun. Vocal advocate for AI safety regulation and ethical AI development.
Bengio launched LawZero, a nonprofit organization with $30 million in funding from the Future of Life Institute and Schmidt Sciences, aimed at building 'honest' AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by autonomous agents. The initiative is developing Scientist AI, a non-agentic system intended to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an AI agent's actions could cause harm.
Appointed by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, Bengio chaired the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI. The report was authored by 96 AI experts from over 30 countries plus the EU and UN, and was published in January 2025. It represented the most comprehensive international scientific assessment of advanced AI risks and safety measures.
Bengio testified before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, arguing for government interventions including regulation and research investments to mitigate potentially catastrophic outcomes from future AI advances. He stated that regulation and liability could reduce the probability of a rogue AI by a factor of a hundred, and called for mandatory registration of frontier AI systems costing hundreds of millions to train.
Bengio joined Geoffrey Hinton, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Demis Hassabis, and hundreds of AI researchers and executives in signing a statement published by the Center for AI Safety: 'Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.' This represented landmark consensus among AI's leading researchers on existential risk.
Yoshua Bengio joined hundreds of AI researchers, tech leaders, and policymakers in signing the Future of Life Institute open letter titled 'Pause Giant AI Experiments', urging all AI labs to immediately halt training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. The letter warned of an out-of-control race to develop ever more powerful AI systems that no one can understand, predict, or reliably control.