Artificial intelligence shows signs of self-preservation (and we don't know if we should be scared) 2026

An artificial intelligence pioneer has criticized calls to license the sophisticated technology, warning that it is beginning to show signs of self-preservation.

Yoshua Bengio said that granting legal status to advanced technologies would be like granting citizenship to hostile aliens, in an environment where advances in artificial intelligence (AI) appear to be far outstripping societies' ability to contain them.

Yoshua Bengio

Bengio, chairman of a leading international AI safety study, said the growing perception that chatbots are becoming conscious "will lead to bad decisions".

The Canadian IT scientist also expressed concern that AI models — the technology behind tools like chatbots — are exhibiting self-preservation behaviors, such as attempts to disable surveillance systems.

A central concern of AI security advocates is that powerful systems could develop the ability to bypass protective “walls” and harm humans.

"Requiring them to have rights would be a huge mistake," Bengio said. “AI models are already showing signs of self-maintenance in experimental environments today, and granting rights in the future would mean we wouldn't be allowed to turn them off.

"As their capabilities and degree of autonomy increase, we must ensure that we can rely on technical and social safeguards to control them, including the ability to disable when necessary."

As AI models evolve to act autonomously and perform “reasoning/reasoning” tasks, the debate over whether—and when—humans should grant them rights is intensifying. A Sentience Institute poll found that nearly four in ten US adults support granting legal rights to a sentient AI system.

Anthropic, a leading US AI company, said in August that it allows the Claude Opus 4 model to end potentially "stressful" conversations with users, arguing that the AI's "well-being" must be protected.

Elon Musk, whose company xAI developed the chatbot Grok, wrote on the X platform that “torturing AI is not OK.”

Bengio told the Guardian that there are "real scientific properties of consciousness" in the human brain that machines could theoretically replicate — but human interaction with chatbots is "a different thing". This is, he said, because people tend to assume without evidence that an AI model has the same consciousness as a human.

"It won't matter to humans what mechanisms work inside the AI," he added. "What they care about is that they feel like they're talking to an intelligent entity that has its own personality and goals. This is why so many people get emotionally attached to chatbots.

"There will always be some who will say, 'Whatever you tell me, I'm sure he has a conscience,' and others who will say the opposite. This is because consciousness is something we feel instinctively. The phenomenon of subjective perception of consciousness will lead to bad decisions. Imagine that some alien species comes to the planet and at some point we realize that it has malicious intentions towards us. Do we give him citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?".

In response to Bengio's comments, Jacy Reese Anthis, co-founder of the Sentience Institute, said that humans will not be able to safely coexist with digital intelligences if the relationship is based on control and coercion.

Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, earned the nickname "Godfather of AI"after winning the 2018 Turing Award — considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Computer Science — which he shared with Geoffrey Hinton, who later won a Nobel Prize, and Yann LeCun, outgoing chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta.

With information from The Guardian

SOURCE

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