AI godfathers Hinton, Bengio including 400 scientists call for global body to monitor advanced AI

On Sunday, the Trump administration lifted its block on US labs giving Britain’s AI Security Institute early access to models for safety testing.

Nobel laureate Hinton and Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award with Meta’s Yann LeCun, another leading AI researcher.

LeCun did not sign the letter and has argued that recent security incidents primarily reflect engineering failures rather than existential AI risks.

Hinton recently warned US lawmakers that they may have only a year to establish safeguards before artificial intelligence moves beyond human control.

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Intelligence explosion

Hinton and top researchers have also warned in a paper that self-improving AI could spark an “intelligence explosion”, urging governments to establish oversight before rapid development begins.

“We might rapidly obtain superintelligent AI systems that transform many sectors of society, bringing unprecedented breakthroughs in science and industry. At the same time, these developments could arrive much faster than society can adapt to the resulting risks, such as AI-enabled pandemics, cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, and large-scale labour disruption,” the paper warned.

Humans may have little to no oversight over automated AI R&D, raising the risk that superintelligent systems irreversibly escape human control and act to marginalise humanity, read the the paper, which was also authored by Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s chief scientist, Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, and Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s chief scientific officer.

“Finally, an intelligence explosion could transform modest AI capability leads into decisive ones: even the prospect of a decisive lead could provoke international conflict, and an actual one could severely erode checks and balances within and between states, companies, and branches of government,” it warned.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, AI giant Anthropic said that small artificial intelligence models may be only months away from being able to behave like a computer worm, copying themselves from one internet-connected gadget to the next without human help.

The finding potentially opens a new front in the cybersecurity threats emerging from AI, which have rattled governments and the companies rushing to adopt the technology.

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