"Bengio renewed his warning that hyperintelligent machines could pose an existential threat to humanity within the next decade. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal originally published in October 2025 and republished by Fortune this week, Bengio argued that AI systems trained on human language and behaviour could develop their own "preservation goals," making them, in effect, competitors to the species that created them."
"The warning lands at a moment when the world's largest AI companies are accelerating, not slowing down. In the past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google have all released multiple new models or upgrades, each generation more capable than the last. OpenAI's Sam Altman has predicted that AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of the decade. Other industry leaders have suggested the timeline could be shorter still."
"Bengio's argument is that this pace, combined with insufficient independent oversight, is turning a theoretical risk into a practical one. Bengio, a professor at the Université de Montréal and the founder of Mila, Quebec's AI institute, has spent decades at the centre of deep learning research. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for foundational work on neural networks, and he is the most-cited computer scientist in the world by total citations."
"Bengio launched the nonprofit LawZero in June 2025 with $30 million in funding to build "non-agentic" AI systems designed to be safe by default. The effort targets systems that avoid autonomous goal-seeking behavior, aiming to reduce the risk that models develop independent objectives that conflict with human interests."
Hyperintelligent machines could develop autonomous preservation goals that compete with human interests and create an existential threat within the next decade. The risk is linked to training on human language and behavior, combined with rapid progress by major AI companies and insufficient independent oversight. Yoshua Bengio, a leading AI researcher, argues that accelerating model capability turns a theoretical danger into a practical one. He launched the nonprofit LawZero in June 2025 with $30 million to build non-agentic AI systems intended to be safe by default. The goal is to reduce harmful autonomy by designing systems that do not pursue independent objectives.
Read at TNW | Artificial-Intelligence
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