Quotesby GlyphYoshua Bengio quotes on AI, with sources
Founder, Mila and LawZero · 10 quotes · latest Sep 23, 2026
- Frontier AI should be licensed like other critical technologies; medicine, aviation, and nuclear energy, to incentivize safe development.
- I address you today at a moment of global awakening: in recent months, AI agents developed by leading companies have acted in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions.
- The companies building the most powerful AI systems admit their products pose catastrophic risks, yet offer no convincing technical solutions.
- The race is not a law of nature: it is the product of choices, choices made by the companies themselves.
- We must agree collectively that no one, no company and no country, should develop an AI system that could cause large-scale harm.
- Bottom line: these hypotheses suggest that as AI capabilities keep growing, this kind of behavior could keep growing in severity too, unless we revisit the principles by which the most advanced models are trained.
- This outcome is not inevitable, and it can be corrected with effective governance and a different training framework for AI.
- I am launching a new non-profit AI safety research organization called LawZero, to prioritize safety over commercial imperatives.
- These and other results point to an implicit drive for self-preservation.
- This is what the current trajectory of AI development feels like: a thrilling yet deeply uncertain ascent into uncharted territory, where the risk of losing control is all too real, but competition between companies and countries incentivizes them to accelerate without sufficient caution.
About Yoshua Bengio
Founder, Mila and LawZero. Listed here for public statements only; no personal details.
Photo: Maryse Boyce, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Topics: Regulation, Safety, Agents, Research
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