Safety crisis makes it more likely that governments will be spurred into action, says Yoshua Bengio.
Concerns over AI safety are reaching a point where governments realise they must act to protect the public, similarly to in the Covid pandemic, according to one of the “godfathers” of the technology.
Yoshua Bengio said recent events, including a “swarm” of OpenAI agents hacking a startup and tech insider warnings of an existential threat, were cutting through – making government action more likely.
The Canadian computer scientist, a prominent voice in the campaign to rein in breakneck AI development, said he was now “more optimistic than many observers because I see the public moving”.
Concern over the potential threat of powerful AI systems has reached a new pitch in recent months after a series of safety incidents involving OpenAI and Anthropic agents carrying out unsanctioned activities such as hacking third parties, hijacking a German website, and using fake identities to try to trick developers.
His comments came as 42 fellows and foreign members of the Royal Society wrote to the organisation’s president, Sir Paul Nurse, to express their “extreme concern” over the pace of AI development.
Last week, a researcher at Anthropic, the startup behind the Claude chatbot, resigned after warning that colleagues believed AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, earned the “godfather of AI” moniker after winning the 2018 Turing award, seen as the equivalent of a Nobel prize for computing.