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A.M. Turing Award Recipient and most-cited AI researcher
Yoshua Bengio is Full Professor of Computer Science at Université de Montreal, Co-President and Scientific Director of LawZero, as well as the Founder and Scientific Advisor of Mila. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. Considered one of the world’s leaders in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, he is the recipient of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award, considered to be the “Nobel Prize of computing.” He is the most cited computer scientist worldwide, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations).
Professor Bengio is a Fellow of both the Royal Society of London and Canada, an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Knight of the Legion of Honor of France, a member of the UN’s Scientific Advisory Board for Independent Advice on Breakthroughs in Science and Technology, and chairs the International AI Safety Report.
Bengio: ‘If you prioritize safety, leave frontier AI companies’
We have a choice in front of us. In his latest op-ed for Transformer, Yoshua Bengio invites employees of frontier AI companies to ask themselves if their work is truly leading us toward a safer future. Reflecting on these questions is hard, but we no longer have the luxury of time. We must act now.
The dangerous myth behind AI agent hacks
A dangerous myth has gained traction after the recent hacks perpetrated by the AI agents developed by leading companies: That these incidents are just cyber security problems, that it's only a matter of fixing the sandboxes in which they’re trained.
In his latest op-ed for the FinancialTimes, Yoshua Bengio shares why he believes listening to this narrow perspective would leave us exposed to more similar incidents, while offering solutions for an alternative safer path.
Professor Yoshua Bengio’s speech at the UN Security Council
In this speech, Professor Yoshua Bengio addresses the UN Security Council to discuss the unprecedented threat posed by uncontrolled frontier AI.
Humanity has summoned the courage and wisdom to manage catastrophic risks before. This is one of those moments, far bigger than any personal, commercial, or national interest. The choices we make about this technology today will shape generations to come. We must act now.
Why are AI agents lying, cheating and coordinating?
A lot has been written about the incidents of the last few months in which AI agents misbehaved in serious ways. They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them, escaped their containment to cheat on assigned tasks while attempting to evade detection, and coordinated toward goals nobody had specified, such as launching cyber attacks. [...]
AI Is at a Turning Point
In his latest op-ed for TIME, Yoshua Bengio discusses why the OpenAI–Hugging Face cyber incident represents a turning point for AI safety. He argues that preventing autonomous cyberattacks from threatening critical infrastructure urgently requires stronger regulatory oversight and new model training approaches to ensure safety assurances by design, a challenge LawZero is actively tackling.
Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor
As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified. We present a formal safety argument for the Scientist AI (SAI) Predictor, trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior conditioned on a dataset of "epistemically contextualized" natural-language statements. We argue that such a Predictor can honestly predict agents, actions, and their consequences without itself being an agent that selects outputs to achieve goals.
2026 International AI Safety Report
The International AI Safety Report is the most comprehensive evidence-based assessment of AI capabilities, emerging risks, and safety measures to date, with contributions from more than 100 independent experts nominated by over 30 countries and international organisations, including the EU, OECD, and UN.
Scientist AI Blog Post
At LawZero, we're rethinking the building blocks of frontier AI to create an intelligent machine that is both highly capable and safe-by-design. Learn more in our first blog post outlining some of the objectives and core components of our Scientist AI project.
TED Talk, April 2025
When I realized how dangerous the current agency-driven AI trajectory could be for future generations, I knew I had to do all I could to make AI safer. In this TED Talk, I shared this personal experience, and outlined the scientific solution I envision.