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A.I. Pioneer Yoshua Bengio Warns About A.I.’s Self-Preserving Ability | At this year's Davos, Bengio raised the alarm over "very strong agency and self-preserving behavior" in A.I. systems.

At this year’s Davos, Bengio raised the alarm over “very strong agency and self-preserving behavior” in A.I. systems.

Andrej Ivano/AFP via Getty Images Yoshua Bengio, a deep learning pioneer that has spent decades researching A.I., is airing his concerns over the emerging technology’s increasingly self-preserving nature. “We are on a path where we’re going to build machines that are more than tools, but that have their own agency and their own goals—and that is not good,” said Bengio while speaking at the 2025 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, yesterday (Jan. 22). OpenAI’s o1 model, for example, attempted to deactivate its oversight mechanism 5 percent of the time when it was told it would be shut down when acting on a particular goal, the study found.

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