AI Summit: Big techs not investing enough in risk management, says Godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio

Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning Yoshua Bengio

Big tech companies are not investing enough in the risk management of artificial intelligence (AI) currently, Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning Yoshua Bengio, told Moneycontrol in an interview.

“No, I'm not (satisfied). I don't think that there is enough investment (by big techs) in risk management,” he said while speaking at the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in Delhi.

Bengio along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun are together called the Godfathers of AI. They won the prestigious Turing Award in 2019.

Bengio has previously warned that AI safety must come before profits.

Asked how that will play out in a highly competitive and global AI race, he said: “It's very simple. If we don't take care of safety, there's going to be accidents. There's going to be people angry about big tech, about technology and even deployment will be problematic.”

“So, these agents that companies want to deploy, there's no oversight. There's no human in the loop. If they start doing really bad things, people will not want to use them, because they will not be trusted,” he warned.

Apart from not doing enough on the risk management side, Bengio said big techs are also not doing satisfactory work on how we redesign current systems so they can be safe by design.

“Companies are hatching the problems one after the other. They don't really have an answer to the question, ‘Is this going to be safe?’ They don't know,” he concluded.