Hinton, Bengio lead 400 scientists demanding AI air-gaps
Hinton, Bengio lead 400 scientists demanding AI air-gaps Published 13 October 2026 The godfather club has split in two. On Tuesday, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio — two of the three pioneers who built modern AI — lent their names to an open letter signed by around 400 scientists from 34 countries, according to Reuters, demanding an international body to set containment standards for frontier AI and to air-gap frontier models from the internet. The third godfather, Meta's Yann LeCun, refused to sign — dismissing the incidents behind the letter as shoddy human engineering rather than model misbehaviour. That split is the story: half the field that created this technology now says voluntary promises have failed, and the other half says the problem was never the models at all. Photo: Geoffrey Hinton at the 2024 Nobel Prize press conference in Stockholm. Credit: Arthur Petron, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. What the letter actually demands The asks are concrete — and qu...