Yoshua Bengio: 'If you prioritize safety, leave frontier AI companies'
pstAsiatech · x · 2026-10-09
Deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio published an exclusive essay in Transformer urging frontier AI employees to leave if they prioritize safety.
- He admits years of motivated reasoning: refusing to accept his life's work could cause harm, and treating catastrophic risk as a distant problem.
- ChatGPT's release broke the dissonance — he realized capability was advancing far faster than assumed, with no known way to control such systems, and pivoted his career to risk mitigation.
- He now calls on researchers to vote with their feet, citing weekly harms long predicted by the field.
A rare direct mobilization from an AI godfather aimed squarely at safety researchers inside frontier labs.
Related event: Yoshua Bengio urges safety-minded staff to quit frontier AI companies(6 posts)→
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