{"id":248223,"date":"2025-11-06T23:06:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T23:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/248223\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T23:06:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T23:06:12","slug":"force-ai-firms-to-buy-nuclear-style-insurance-says-yoshua-bengio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/248223\/","title":{"rendered":"Force AI firms to buy nuclear-style insurance, says Yoshua Bengio"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Artificial intelligence companies should be compelled by law to have liability insurance to cover existential risks, according to one of the key pioneers of the revolutionary technology.<\/p>\n

Speaking at the FT Future of AI Summit<\/a> in London on Thursday, Yoshua Bengio warned that AI companies had few financial incentives to build safer AI systems and that this required governments to make an urgent market intervention. <\/p>\n

The Canadian computer scientist and Turing Prize winner encouraged politicians to mandate liability insurance for AI companies, as is done with developers of nuclear power plants. He also called for an increase in research and development investment for \u201cguardrails\u201d that protect people from catastrophic events, such as AI being used to build new bioweapons.<\/p>\n

Asked what made him think companies cannot be relied upon to build such guardrails, Bengio said: \u201cI don\u2019t know, but I don\u2019t want to bet the future of my children on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The computer scientist is among the so-called godparents of AI \u2014 whose research was relied upon to build generative AI systems created by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google \u2014 who have grown increasingly concerned about the risks associated with the technology.<\/p>\n

Bengio\u2019s demands for government intervention come as OpenAI and Anthropic consider using investor funds<\/a> to settle potential claims from multibillion-dollar lawsuits, as insurers balk at providing coverage for the risks associated with AI.<\/p>\n

People close to the situation say the reason insurance companies are reticent to provide comprehensive cover for AI companies comes from the unprecedented scale of potential claims faced by relatively young tech companies.
Fei-Fei Li, who, alongside Bengio and other AI pioneers<\/a> was awarded the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering this week, said: \u201cIt\u2019s not seven companies\u2019 responsibility and it\u2019s not only a few individuals who know the technology. It\u2019s all of our responsibility\u201d to develop AI with human dignity at its core.<\/p>\n

Asked what she thought of the reputation for Big Tech to \u201cmove fast and break things\u201d \u2014 an early motto at Meta\u2019s social network Facebook \u2014 Li said: \u201cThat\u2019s just one company,\u201d adding there were academics and other key figures seeking to rein in the excesses of Big Tech groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m going to defend the AI sector a little bit,\u201d she said. \u201cI think the AI sector is very big and the AI ecosystem is not just a few companies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"Yoshua<\/a><\/p>\n

But Bengio said AI systems had already been shown to be powerful tools that can create military weapons and have shown \u201cdeceitful\u201d traits that mean they could turn against human users.<\/p>\n

He was concerned that instead of focusing on safety, tech companies are \u201call competing with each other in this very tight race where they want their AIs to perform better on benchmarks, [to] get more engagement from users, because they want to make sure they maintain or improve their market share\u201d.<\/p>\n

Helen King, vice-president for responsibility at Google\u2019s AI arm DeepMind, said companies were paying attention to so-called frontier safety risks. She also warned that \u201ca really great coding agent also increases the risk of it being really great at cyber attacks\u201d.<\/p>\n

The debate over AI safety came a day after Nvidia chief Jensen Huang told the FT<\/a>: \u201cChina is going to win the AI race.\u201d<\/p>\n

The head of the AI chipmaker and the world\u2019s most valuable listed company said that the west, including the US and UK, was being held back by \u201ccynicism\u201d as Beijing loosens regulations and cuts energy costs for data centres.<\/p>\n

Responding to Huang\u2019s comments, Bengio said the US-China AI race was \u201ca very unhealthy direction because it\u2019s an incentive for both players to cut corners on public good and safety\u201d.<\/p>\n

This story has been amended to correct comments attributed to Helen King, vice-president for responsibility at Google\u2019s AI arm DeepMind<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-248223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}