AI TRENDS | Bengio Warns AI Lowers the Barrier to Harmful Acts

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference science frontier forum, Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio warned via remote link that AI has lowered the barrier to wrongdoing while raising the upper limit of harm. According to Odaily, Bengio has focused in recent years on AI safety challenges, and his LawZero project is working on protective systems designed to detect and stop harmful AI behaviors such as deception and self-preservation. The international AI safety report he leads also concluded that current safeguards are already failing to keep pace with the rapid growth of AI capabilities.