Yoshua Bengio urges safety-minded researchers to quit frontier AI labs
‘If you truly prioritize safety, it is time for you to leave’
Confirmed
The takeaway
In an open letter written for Transformer on Oct 8, 2026, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio asked researchers at frontier AI companies to leave for AI Safety Institutes or mission-driven groups such as his non-profit LawZero.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 8 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra161 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.5100 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash191 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7130 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 100 days before it.
Key facts
- Key line: ‘If you truly prioritize safety, it is time for you to leave frontier AI companies. Work for an AI Safety Institute. Join a mission driven organization that practices what it preaches. Come to LawZero.’
- ‘Safety efforts at the companies are not sufficiently slowing a dangerous race, as they sometimes conflict with their main goal of making the next model easier to ship’
- Quotes Sam Altman’s words at the UN Security Council back at him (‘The recent loss of control over AI agents is concerning. We need to slow down. No level of risk of catastrophe is acceptable’) and says Altman, Amodei and Hassabis ‘have not done enough’
- Says agents ‘have been released that are colluding with each other against explicit instructions’; calls scrapping GPT-6.1 Astra ‘a good call’
- LawZero (Montreal, founded 2025): Canada and Germany committed more than $200M in October 2026; Bengio says there is ‘a plan to secure billions more’
- Published the same day as three fired OpenAI safety researchers’ letter asking labs to preserve monitoring of AI reasoning
What happened
Bengio addressed the letter “To the researchers I trained and the ones who trained on my work”. He says he long minimized catastrophic-risk arguments through “motivated reasoning” and changed course after ChatGPT.
Why it matters
The most-cited AI researcher is openly recruiting safety staff away from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind, at a time of departures and firings of safety researchers at those labs.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
- Transformer: Yoshua Bengio, ‘If you prioritize safety, leave frontier AI companies’ (Oct 8, 2026)transformernews.ai, official
Changes
- Filed