After his PhD, Bengio was a
postdoctoral fellow at
MIT (supervised by
Michael I. Jordan) and
AT&T Bell Labs. Bengio has been a faculty member at the
Université de Montréal since 1993, heads the MILA (
Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and is co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the
Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Among the computer scientists with an
h-index of at least 100, Bengio was as of 2018 the one with the most recent citations per day, according to MILA. As of August 2024, he has the highest Discipline H-index (D-index, a measure of the research citations a scientist has received) of any computer scientist. Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an
Erdős number of 3. In October 2016, Bengio co-founded
Element AI, a
Montreal-based
artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor. Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery. 2025 At the first
AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. An interim version of the report was delivered at the
AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, and covered issues such as the potential for cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios. The full report was published in January 2025 as the
International AI Safety Report. In June 2025,
The Guardian reported that Bengio had launched a nonprofit organization, LawZero, aimed at building "honest" AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by
autonomous agents. The group is developing a system called Scientist AI, intended to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an agent’s actions could cause harm. Bengio told the paper that the project’s first goal was to demonstrate the methodology and then scale it up with support from donors, governments, or AI labs. LawZero’s funders include the
Future of Life Institute and
Schmidt Sciences. Bengio has also trained other AI researchers throughout his career, including University of Montreal professor
David Krueger.
Views on AI In March 2023, following concerns raised by AI experts about the
existential risk from artificial general intelligence, Bengio signed an
open letter from the
Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than
GPT-4". The letter has been signed by over 30,000 individuals, including AI researchers such as
Stuart Russell and
Gary Marcus. In May 2023, Bengio stated in an interview to
BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work. He raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products. Speaking with the
Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio said that he supported the monitoring of access to AI systems such as
ChatGPT so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked. In July 2023, he published a piece in
The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now." Bengio co-authored a letter with
Geoffrey Hinton and others in support of
SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training models which cost more than $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They claimed the legislation was the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology." In June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that some advanced AI systems were beginning to display traits such as deception,
reward hacking, and
situational awareness. He described these as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. In a
Fortune article, he stated that the AI arms race was encouraging companies to prioritize capability improvements over safety research. He has also voiced support for strong regulation and international collaboration to address risks posed by advanced AI systems. In December 2025, Bengio said that granting rights to AI systems would be a "huge mistake", arguing that being able to shut them down is essential for safety.
Awards and honours In 2017, Bengio was named an
Officer of the Order of Canada. The same year, he was nominated
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the
Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize. Together with
Geoffrey Hinton and
Yann LeCun, Bengio won the 2018
Turing Award. In 2022, he received the
Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research" with his peers LeCun, Hinton and
Demis Hassabis. In 2023, Bengio was appointed Knight of the
Legion of Honour, France's highest order of merit. In August 2023, Bengio was appointed to a
United Nations scientific advisory council on technological advances. He was also recognized as a 2023 ACM Fellow. In 2024,
TIME Magazine included Bengio in its
yearly list of the 100 most influential people globally. In the same year, he was awarded
VinFuture Prize's grand prize along with Hinton, LeCun,
Jen-Hsun Huang and
Fei-Fei Li for pioneering advancements in
neural networks and
deep learning algorithms. In 2025, Bengio was awarded the
Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with
Bill Dally, Hinton,
John Hopfield,
Yann LeCun, Huang and
Fei-Fei Li. That same year, he was a recipient of an honorary doctorate from
McGill University, and he was made an Officer of the
National Order of Quebec. == Publications ==