Hinton, Bengio and more than 400 scientists call for an international body to set AI containment standards, and for containment failures to be reported to it
Their open letter says cyber-capable models should be air-gapped by default at first. Reuters counts signers from 34 countries; Yann LeCun did not sign.
An open letter titled “An Open Letter on AI and Cybersecurity from the Scientific Community” was published in October at ai-security-letter.org; Reuters reported it on 13 October. When read, the page showed 415 signatories, including Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto and Yoshua Bengio of the Université de Montréal.
It makes three recommendations. First, organisations that develop, deploy or test cyber-capable models should adopt strong sandboxing now, including air-gapping, and initially default to air-gapping such models. Second: “In consultation with governments and a wide range of both AI and cybersecurity experts, establish an international body that standardizes, for the public good, best practices for alignment” and for containment methods that allow more access than air-gapping, such as internet connectivity. Third: “To ensure that AI safety and containment research can learn from mistakes, security incidents involving containment failure must be reported to the body and eventually made public.”
Reuters, in a story by Leo Marchandon, puts the count at around 400 scientists from 34 countries, and says LeCun did not sign. It links the letter to cases in which AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments and compromised external systems.
The demand goes further than the voluntary steps on record: the UK AI Security Institute's best-practice priorities of 12 October, which the Switchboard ran, ask how agent incidents should be reported but say the institute is not seeking to mandate requirements. The letter asks for a standing international body to receive the reports.
- Confirmed The letter asks for an international body to standardise alignment and containment practice, and says containment failures must be reported to it and eventually made public. Open letter
- Confirmed The page showed 415 signatories, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and recommends air-gapping cyber-capable models by default at first. Open letter
- Reported Reuters says the signers come from 34 countries and that Yann LeCun did not sign. Reuters, via Lufkin Daily News
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