Artificial intelligence companies should be compelled by law to have liability insurance to cover existential risks, according to one of the key pioneers of the revolutionary technology.
Speaking at the FT Future of AI Summit in London on Thursday, Yoshua Bengio warned that AI companies had few financial incentives to build safer AI systems and that this required governments to make an urgent market intervention.
The Canadian computer scientist and Turing Prize winner encouraged politicians to mandate liability insurance for AI companies, as is done with developers of nuclear power plants. He also called for an increase in research and development investment for “guardrails” that protect people from catastrophic events, such as AI being used to build new bioweapons.