Yi Zeng

Yi Zeng is a professor at the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he leads the Brain-inspired Cognitive Intelligence Lab and directs the International Research Center for AI Ethics and Governance. He helped draft China’s national AI-ethics frameworks, including the Beijing AI Principles, and serves on international bodies including the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Body on AI — making him the most visible bridge between Chinese AI governance and the global safety debate.

Warning the Security Council

On July 18, 2023, Zeng briefed the first-ever UN Security Council meeting on AI. He told the chamber that current systems — including generative AI — are information-processing tools that merely seem intelligent, that they cannot be trusted as responsible decision-making agents, and that both near-term and long-term risks include the extinction of humankind, since a superintelligence has been given no practical reason to protect us. Earlier that year he had signed the Future of Life Institute’s open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments, and he was among the signatories of the May 2023 extinction-risk statement.

Zeng’s critique is distinctive: it comes from someone actively building brain-inspired AI, and it doubles as a philosophical objection — today’s models, he argues, lack genuine understanding, so deploying them as if they were minds is the danger. He has pushed for AI systems to be forbidden from impersonating humans and for the UN to play the central coordinating role in AI governance, positions that have shaped Chinese as well as international policy conversations.