VIDEO: How fearful should we be of AI?Sarah Ferguson7.30Posted Wed 23 Sep 2026 at 7:59pmWed 23 Sep 2026 at 7:59pmWed 23 Sep 2026 at 7:59pm, updated Wed 23 Sep 2026 at 9:13pmWed 23 Sep 2026 at 9:13pmWed 23 Sep 2026 at 9:13pmHas Video Duration: 9 minutes 55 seconds.Watch 9m How fearful should we be of AI?Share optionsFacebookLinkedInX (formerly Twitter)TranscriptSARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Yoshua Bengio, welcome to 7.30.YOSHUA BENGIO, CO=CHAIR, UN SCIENTIFIC PANEL ON AI:  Thanks for having me.SARAH FERGUSON:  Since we spoke to you last December has anything changed in the threat posed by AI, or are people paying more attention to the risks now?YOSHUA BENGIO:  I would say both. And it's that threats that sounded a bit theoretical and for which we only have like lab evidence have now happened in the wild with AI systems spontaneously deciding to disobey their instructions and attack another company, organise into a swarm all kinds of crazy stuff when autonomous agents are given a mission and they will do anything to achieve it.SARAH FERGUSON:  Now, you've been talking about the dangers of AI. You've been talking about the way that AI is deceptive towards its human controllers, again, for some time. Is there anything amongst those incidents that we've seen this year that took you by surprise?YOSHUA BENGIO:  Yes and most importantly, I did not expect it to happen so quickly. So, I am also concerned, you know, I have children and a grandchild and I'm thinking about their future and I see things accelerating. And I think that dealing with those risks, the catastrophic risks of various kinds due to the power of AI should be an urgent mission for humanity so that humans remain in charge and that we keep human dignity and flourishing at the centre of our choices.SARAH FERGUSON:  Now, you're obviously at the UN this week. Today, the US President rejected calls, including from Australia, for coordinated global regulation of AI. He dismisses concerns about AI as a hoax. Can the rest of the world achieve anything with that attitude in the White House?YOSHUA BENGIO:  Well, you know, reality has a way to force ourselves into action. When we get incidents like last summer, citizens respond and eventually governments respond, and we're starting to see the beginning of that. Now, there there's a lot that countries outside of the US can do in order to move towards a multilateral management of those risks. Eventually, it's going to be clear, it's going to be in the interest of the US and China to, make sure there is, international governance of Ais, to make sure that, you know, these, potentially catastrophic outcomes don't happen, that the American infrastructures, for example, are not attacked by such AIs or that viruses created in, you know, by an AI somewhere doesn't, doesn't affect the American citizens, because it's a global problem.SARAH FERGUSON:  One of the reasons given for US tech companies continuing with their approach is the fear that China will catch up with the United States, and that that poses a significant military threat to America. Could that ever be a justification for those US tech companies to continue on the path they’re on?YOSHUA BENGIO:  Not at all. It is reason enough to sit at a table with the Chinese because, you know, they're humans too. They, they want to have a life. They want their children to have a life. Now, right now, they're perceiving, to some extent this is true, that the greatest risk is coming from the American companies because they're roughly six months ahead, and so the American models are the most dangerous. But we also seen some incidents from Chinese models. So it's just coming with a bit of delay from the Chinese models. So I think it is in the rational interest, self-interest of both parties to sit down and, agree on principles like the ones that the heads of state put forward recently.SARAH FERGUSON:  We are starting to hear a lot about this term recursive self-improvement, AI’s ability to build the next generation of AIs. Can you explain why that is just a central question and at the core of the danger. YOSHUA BENGIO:  Right now, it is human researchers and engineers who write the code for the next generation of AI and so they are in control. They choose, for example, the details of how the system is trained. And yeah, this is not working that well, but at least it is humans deciding to do it. Imagine we have an AI that is smarter than us, so it is able to do that research and engineering all by itself and is like the AIs that, you know, escaped from OpenAI during the summer. In other words, it's misaligned, it has some malicious goals. So it could design an AI that will be even more powerful than itself and even less controllable and even more malicious. That's like a recipe for suicide, as far as I'm concerned.SARAH FERGUSON:  So how do you stop that? Obviously, the head of the heads of the big tech companies are talking themselves about the danger Dario Amodei has, Sam Altman has. But at the same time, they do want to keep going down the same path they're on. Is humanity safe if those big companies continue to experiment in the way they're experimenting?YOSHUA BENGIO:  I don't think we can take that chance. As for any potentially dangerous technology, the people who build the technology should have to prove, demonstrate to independent scientists that what they're building is not going to create catastrophic harm. You're not allowed to build a bridge, with the hope that it's going be fine when the cars go on it, right? You have to demonstrate that it's going to be fine. You're not allowed to distribute a drug, before you've done studies showing that it's going to be safe. But we have no such thing for AI and, and it's crazy. Now, I think it's also an incentive problem that, that the forces of competition between companies and between countries is not healthy. And, and we need companies to take this seriously, but we need also governments to take this seriously. And it is an international question because those very powerful AIs, especially if we lose control of them eventually that's going to affect all of us.And so, it shouldn't be the decisions of just a few CEOs or, you know, a few governments to figure out, you know, what's good for humanity.SARAH FERGUSON:  You know, it's okay for me, I'm still able to sleep at night. I'm not entirely sure how you're able to sleep at night, but let, let me ask you a very practical question. How does a smaller country like Australia, albeit one with huge potential for hosting data centres, have a say in the future?YOSHUA BENGIO:  So the reason I'm able to sleep at night and the reason why I think a country like Australia can make a difference is that we, we have agency right now. And by we, I don't mean just the US government or the Chinese government. I'm Canadian and I'm involved in this LawZero project. We can develop AI that will be safe and will help protect us from the kind of catastrophes that we're just getting a little warning of. That's the first thing. The second thing is right now smaller countries, middle powers don't have much of a say in what is going on, but it can change. That's something we can take in our hands if we take both the power and the risks of AI seriously. And individual countries like Australia or Canada probably can't do much. But as Mark Carney was saying, when we form coalitions, when we put our resources together, our minds, our energy, our talent, we can be in the game and we can bring the world into a place that's better aligned with our values, with democracy, and the idea that we should keep our sovereignty in a multilateral world.SARAH FERGUSON: Should small to medium countries like Australia be developing some form of sovereign AI? In our case, it would be by US companies setting aside some compute resources for Australian firms. Is that something Australia should pursue?YOSHUA BENGIO:  Well, what I've seen in other, countries is local companies taking the job of building the data centres so that they're going to be owned by local companies. Because as you know, if the AIs belong to an American company, then the US government can basically have access to everything that, all the data that is in those data centres. That being said, I think this is something that Australia can coordinate with other countries who are in exactly the same situation, right? So we can exchange about how to do this. We can share expertise, talent, and find a solution that works for us.SARAH FERGUSON:  On that note, on a note of optimism, Yoshua Bengio, thank you very much indeed for joining us.YOSHUA BENGIO:  Thank you.Yoshua Bengio has been called the Godfather AI and he speaks to 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson about the threat posed by artificial intelligence. AustraliaAI