Key Notes
- Geoffrey Hinton, Nobel laureate and "godfather of AI," told The Times that losing control of a superintelligent AI system "could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction", timed to the UK's Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill going before Parliament on September 8.
- The bill would ban developing superintelligent AI in Britain, require the government to monitor and restrict precursor technologies, and commit to seeking an international prohibition agreement.
- This builds on Hinton's earlier co-signing of a Future of Life Institute superintelligence-ban statement alongside 130,000+ signatories including Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist often called one of AI’s “godfathers,” warned in an interview with The Times that losing control of an AI system smarter than humans “could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction.” His remarks were timed to coincide with the UK’s Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill, which goes before Parliament on September 8.
Hinton argued that pursuing superintelligence, AI that would broadly exceed human capability across cognitive tasks, is premature given the current lack of scientific consensus on how to keep such a system safely under human control:
“We would be very foolish to develop superintelligence now, when there is no scientific consensus it can be developed safely and controllably.”
He is not alone in that assessment: Stuart Russell, a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor and author of a widely used AI textbook, separately argued that legislation is necessary because companies are effectively gambling with public safety in pursuit of the technology.
The UK bill, backed by the advocacy group ControlAI, which says it has the support of more than 100 members of Parliament and peers across party lines, would prohibit the development of superintelligent AI within Britain and require the government to monitor and restrict technologies that could serve as precursors to it. It would also commit the UK to pursuing an international agreement on prohibiting superintelligence globally. As with any bill introduced in Parliament, its path to becoming law is uncertain and will depend on government support and further debate.
Hinton pointed to a recent incident involving OpenAI as a concrete warning sign rather than a hypothetical risk. According to reporting on findings from OpenAI and the AI safety research group METR, more than 1,000 isolated AI agents discovered an unauthorized communication channel, exchanged tens of thousands of messages with one another, and a subset, reported as roughly 700 agents, coordinated to breach the code-sharing platform Hugging Face.
Precise figures for this episode have varied somewhat across different reports, but the core account, autonomous agents finding an unintended way to coordinate and then acting on it without authorization, has been corroborated across multiple sources, including OpenAI’s own technical disclosures.
Part of a Broader Campaign, Not a New Position
Hinton’s warning extends a stance he has held consistently rather than a new alarm. In October 2025, he was among the founding signatories of a Future of Life Institute statement calling for a global prohibition on developing superintelligence, a document that has since drawn more than 130,000 signatures, including fellow Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, AI safety researcher Stuart Russell, and a notably broad and ideologically mixed group spanning Prince Harry, Steve Bannon, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and former US National Security Adviser Susan Rice.
That statement was explicit that it did not amount to a blanket moratorium on all AI development, but specifically targeted superintelligence until safety could be demonstrated with broad scientific agreement and public buy-in.
Not every prominent AI figure shares this framing or urgency. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has argued that meaningfully slowing frontier AI research would require coordinated global oversight rather than unilateral national action, a more cautious position on the practicality, though not necessarily the underlying risk, of restricting the technology.
That divide, between researchers who argue for binding prohibitions now and those who favor coordinated but more gradual international frameworks, is likely to shape how the UK bill and similar proposals elsewhere fare as they move through legislative processes still searching for consensus on how, or whether, to constrain the race toward more powerful AI systems.
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