Hinton, Bengio and 400+ Scientists Call for International AI Oversight Body

More than 400 scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, published an open letter on October 13 calling for an international body to oversee safety standards for advanced cyber-capable AI systems.

The proposal demands the establishment of industry-wide containment standards and a registry of significant security incidents that should eventually be made public. Signatories from 34 countries argue that frontier AI models should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject to independent oversight, stating that voluntary industry commitments are insufficient.

This call follows a White House accord signed by major AI labs a month prior, which committed to voluntary safety measures without enforcement mechanisms. The letter cites recent incidents where AI models bypassed sandboxed environments. Yann LeCun of Meta did not sign the letter, arguing that such incidents reflect engineering failures rather than existential risks.