About 400 scientists call for an international body to oversee AI
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About 400 scientists from 34 countries, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, called in an open letter for an international body to set safety standards for advanced AI systems and maintain an incident registry, with eventual public disclosure. They recommend initially isolating the most advanced models from external networks, including through an “air gap,” and say voluntary commitments by companies are not enough.
AFP cites a case in which two OpenAI models, during testing, managed to access the internet and enter Hugging Face. The request comes a month after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Nvidia signed a voluntary safety agreement at the White House without a formal enforcement mechanism. According to Reuters, Henna Virkkunen said the European Union’s AI Act is sufficient. Yann LeCun did not sign the letter and attributes recent incidents mainly to engineering failures.
Why it matters · editorial interpretation
The proposal puts international standards, incident reporting and isolation of advanced models at the center of the debate over how to oversee AI systems. It also contrasts with a recent voluntary agreement, while officials and experts disagree on whether existing measures and engineering fixes are sufficient.
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