Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio (born 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal, founder of the Mila institute, and — by citation count — the most-cited AI researcher in the world. With Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun he shared the 2018 Turing Award for the deep-learning breakthroughs that underpin systems like ChatGPT. Unlike his co-laureates, he never joined a tech giant, keeping his base in academia.

From architect to auditor

Bengio’s alarm crystallized publicly in 2023, when he signed the Future of Life Institute open letter calling for a pause on giant AI experiments and the Center for AI Safety statement on extinction risk. He has since become the scientific establishment’s designated referee: he chairs the International AI Safety Report, a synthesis of the evidence on frontier-AI risks written with about a hundred experts and backed by dozens of governments, delivered ahead of the 2025 Paris AI summit.

In June 2025 he went further, launching LawZero, a Montreal nonprofit with roughly $30 million in philanthropic backing, to develop “safe-by-design” AI — including a non-agentic “Scientist AI” meant to act as a guardrail that monitors and understands rather than acts. He founded it, he wrote, because frontier models were already showing signs of deception, cheating, and self-preservation in evaluations, and he has warned that hyperintelligent systems with self-preservation goals could threaten humanity within a decade.

Bengio describes his shift in almost confessional terms — a researcher reckoning with what his life’s work unleashed and spending what he calls his remaining scientific career trying to make it safe. He remains a believer in AI’s promise for science and medicine; his fight is with the race, not the technology.