Bengio urges safety-minded AI researchers to leave frontier labs for independent safety work

Yoshua Bengio, co-president of LawZero, has urged researchers who prioritize AI safety to leave frontier AI companies and take up roles at safety institutes or mission-driven organizations.

He argues that safety efforts inside the labs are not sufficiently slowing a dangerous race toward recursive self-improvement.

As an alternative, Bengio points to LawZero's recent funding of more than C$200 million from Canada and Germany, which he presents as evidence that independent safety work can be supported at scale. The report states this as Bengio's position and does not independently assess whether the labs' safety efforts are inadequate.