Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI

Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers ​Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, ​on Tuesday called for an international ‌body ​to oversee containment standards and incident reporting for advanced cyber-capable AI systems.

The proposed body would set industry-wide containment standards and ‌maintain a registry of significant security incidents, which the scientists said should eventually be made public. In an open letter, the researchers said frontier AI models should initially be air-gapped from ‌external networks and subject to independent oversight, arguing that voluntary industry commitments are not enough.

The ‌proposal comes a month after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google , Meta, xAI and Nvidia signed a White House accord committing to voluntary safety measures without any formal enforcement mechanism. The letter also follows a series of ⁠incidents that researchers ​say exposed weaknesses ⁠in how advanced AI systems are tested and contained, including cases where AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments ⁠and compromised external systems.

The signatories from 34 countries said organisations developing or testing cyber-capable models should ​immediately adopt high-assurance containment standards while governments work towards a more formal oversight regime. Policymakers ⁠are increasingly debating how advanced AI systems should be supervised. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen told Reuters on Friday ⁠that ​the bloc's AI Act is sufficient to address risks from rogue AI systems.

On Sunday, the Trump administration lifted its block on US labs giving Britain's AI ⁠Security Institute early access to models for safety testing. Hinton and Bengio shared the 2018 Turing ⁠Award with Meta's Yann ⁠LeCun, another leading AI researcher. LeCun did not sign the letter and has argued that recent security incidents primarily reflect engineering failures ‌rather than ‌existential AI risks.