TL;DRYoshua Bengio, the Turing Award-winning AI researcher, has warned that hyperintelligent machines could develop autonomous “preservation goals” and pose an existential threat to humanity within a decade. Bengio launched the nonprofit LawZero in June 2025 with $30 million in funding to build “non-agentic” AI systems designed to be safe by default.
Yoshua Bengio, the Turing Award-winning computer scientist widely regarded as one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, has renewed his warning that hyperintelligent machines could pose an existential threat to humanity within the next decade. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal originally published in October 2025 and republished by Fortune this week, Bengio argued that AI systems trained on human language and behaviour could develop their own “preservation goals,” making them, in effect, competitors to the species that created them.
The warning lands at a moment when the world’s largest AI companies are accelerating, not slowing down. In the past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Google have all released multiple new models or upgrades, each generation more capable than the last. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has predicted that AI will surpass human intelligence by the end of the decade. Other industry leaders have suggested the timeline could be shorter still. Bengio’s argument is that this pace, combined with insufficient independent oversight, is turning a theoretical risk into a practical one.
