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Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton Call for A.I. Safeguards. Enterprise Buyers Can Help Enforce Them.

Companies are connecting A.I. agents to email, customer records and payment systems, all while oversight standards remain unsettled. The largest buyers can help close the gap by making safety requirements enforceable through contracts, insurance and independent audits.

On Oct. 13, about 400 scientists from 34 countries, including Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, signed an open letter calling for an international body to set containment standards for A.I. systems capable of cyberattacks and to track their failures. The letter’s first recommendation applies to every company using these systems: organizations developing, deploying and testing them “should immediately adopt high-assurance containment systems.”

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Most of the attention has gone to the labs that build the models and the proposed international body. The broader and, in my view, more important question for businesses is how to set and enforce limits on what their agents can access and do. In my advisory work, I see a major gap: companies have neither an agreed-upon view of what appropriate oversight of A.I. agents looks like nor a shared definition of what constitutes an A.I. incident. Despite this, firms are moving ahead, connecting A.I. agents to email, customer records and payment systems.

Greater international coordination would help, but I am skeptical about how long it will take to develop an approach........

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