Bengio op-ed: frontier AI employees who prioritize safety should leave
Yoshua_Bengio · x · 2026-10-08
- Turing Award winner and deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio published an op-ed in Transformer openly calling on frontier AI company employees: if you genuinely prioritize safety, leave and join the fight for a safer future.
- He admits he spent years in motivated reasoning—unable to face that his life's work could cause harm—and dismissed catastrophic-risk arguments as a distant problem. ChatGPT's release broke the dissonance: model capability had advanced far beyond what he assumed, while control remained unsolved.
- Since then he has devoted himself to AI risk mitigation and argues there is no longer time to wait: "We must act now." The piece is addressed directly to researchers he trained or influenced.
Related event: Yoshua Bengio urges safety-minded staff to quit frontier AI companies(6 posts)→
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