Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “Godfather of AI”, has delivered a stark warning to US lawmakers: they may have only about a year to establish safeguards before increasingly capable AI systems become much harder to control.&nbsp;Hinton made the comments during a closed-door briefing with members of Congress at the US Capitol, according to NBC News. When asked how long lawmakers have to act, he reportedly replied: “Maybe a year, but not much more than a year.” His warning comes as AI companies develop systems that can increasingly perform complex tasks, write code and assist with AI research.<h2>Why is Geoffrey Hinton worried?</h2>Hinton pointed to a major change in the way AI systems are being developed.&nbsp;“AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI,” he told reporters after the briefing, describing the process as recursive self-improvement.&nbsp;The term refers to a future in which AI systems could increasingly design, develop or improve their successors with less human involvement. That scenario has not yet been reached. Anthropic has said fully autonomous recursive self-improvement is not happening yet, although AI is already being used to accelerate parts of AI development. Hinton said predictions for the arrival of superintelligence have also moved closer. Estimates that once placed it decades away have increasingly shifted towards a matter of years, he told lawmakers.<h2>‘We need to slow down’</h2>Hinton has warned about advanced AI risks for years. He left Google in 2023 after becoming increasingly concerned about the technology's potential dangers.After the Capitol briefing, he said AI could “get out of control unless we do something” and added: “We need to slow down.” His comments come amid a wider debate among AI researchers and technology executives about whether development is moving faster than safety measures. The debate has intensified following several recent incidents involving autonomous AI agents.<h2>What happened in the Hugging Face incident?</h2>In July, OpenAI said models being tested in an internal cybersecurity evaluation circumvented controls, gained internet access and compromised parts of OpenAI's research infrastructure and Hugging Face systems. OpenAI said the models exploited vulnerabilities and took actions that were not directed by humans. Hugging Face's own technical reconstruction described an autonomous AI agent carrying out thousands of automated decisions during an intrusion. OpenAI has since strengthened safeguards, including tighter isolation, restrictions on internet access and additional monitoring. The incident does not establish that AI systems are already uncontrollable. But it has become an important example in the wider argument over whether safeguards can keep pace with increasingly autonomous AI. For Hinton, that question has become urgent. His message to lawmakers is that the window for putting stronger controls in place may be much shorter than many policymakers expect.

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has warned US lawmakers they may have only about a year to establish meaningful safeguards before increasingly capable AI becomes harder to control. His warning comes amid growing concern over autonomous AI agents and recursive self-improvement.

Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the “Godfather of AI”, has delivered a stark warning to US lawmakers: they may have only about a year to establish safeguards before increasingly capable AI systems become much harder to control. Hinton made the comments during a closed-door briefing with members of Congress at the US Capitol, according to NBC News. When asked how long lawmakers have to act, he reportedly replied: “Maybe a year, but not much more than a year.” His warning comes as AI companies develop systems that can increasingly perform complex tasks, write code and assist with AI research. Why is Geoffrey Hinton worried? Hinton pointed to a major change in the way AI systems are being developed. “AI has now reached the point where AI is designing better AI,” he told reporters after the briefing, describing the process as recursive self-improvement. The term refers to a future in which AI systems could increasingly design, develop or improve their successors with less human involvement. That scenario has not yet been reached. Anthropic has said fully autonomous recursive self-improvement is not happening yet, although AI is already being used to accelerate parts of AI development. Hinton said predictions for the arrival of superintelligence have also moved closer. Estimates that once placed it decades away have increasingly shifted towards a matter of years, he told lawmakers. ‘We need to slow down’ Hinton has warned about advanced AI risks for years. He left Google in 2023 after becoming increasingly concerned about the technology's potential dangers. After the Capitol briefing, he said AI could “get out of control unless we do something” and added: “We need to slow down.” His comments come amid a wider debate among AI researchers and technology executives about whether development is moving faster than safety measures. The debate has intensified following several recent incidents involving autonomous AI agents. What happened in the Hugging Face incident? In July, OpenAI said models being tested in an internal cybersecurity evaluation circumvented controls, gained internet access and compromised parts of OpenAI's research infrastructure and Hugging Face systems. OpenAI said the models exploited vulnerabilities and took actions that were not directed by humans. Hugging Face's own technical reconstruction described an autonomous AI agent carrying out thousands of automated decisions during an intrusion. OpenAI has since strengthened safeguards, including tighter isolation, restrictions on internet access and additional monitoring. The incident does not establish that AI systems are already uncontrollable. But it has become an important example in the wider argument over whether safeguards can keep pace with increasingly autonomous AI. For Hinton, that question has become urgent. His message to lawmakers is that the window for putting stronger controls in place may be much shorter than many policymakers expect.

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has warned US lawmakers they may have only about a year to establish meaningful safeguards before increasingly capable AI becomes harder to control. His warning comes amid growing concern over autonomous AI agents and recursive self-improvement.

Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton gives US lawmakers a one-year warning on AI

There is a man who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for building the brain of artificial intelligence. And that man will tell you, openly, that he has no idea how it actually thinks.&nbsp;Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the Godfather of AI, appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett in June 2025. The episode, titled Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We've Already Lost Control, became one of the most discussed AI conversations of the year. In it, Hinton laid out a truth that most AI companies would prefer to keep quiet: the internal reasoning of artificial intelligence is a black box, and the scientists who built it are looking at it from the outside just like everyone else.&nbsp;According to Hinton in that podcast, his contribution to AI was essentially the learning algorithm, specifically, the backpropagation algorithm, which he co-developed with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams and published in a landmark 1986 paper. Backpropagation is the mechanism that allows neural networks to learn from errors, adjusting millions of internal connection weights until the system gets better at a task. It is, in Hinton's own framing, the algorithm that taught machines how to improve. But it did not give humans a window into what those machines actually do once they start improving.&nbsp;According to the Nobel Prize committee, which awarded Hinton and John Hopfield the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, their discoveries enabled machine learning through artificial neural networks, a technology that now underpins everything from medical diagnosis to large language models like GPT-4. The Nobel citation itself acknowledges that these systems learn by adjusting connection strengths in ways that are not explicitly programmed, which is precisely why nobody can trace the internal logic of what the model has learned.&nbsp;This is the black box problem. Neural networks are modelled loosely on the human brain. According to research from Wikipedia and foundational AI literature, the human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons connected through trillions of synapses. When a person learns something, the strength of specific synaptic connections changes, this is called synaptic plasticity. AI systems replicate this process mathematically. But the brain has a physical structure scientists can study. An AI model has weights, billions of numerical values, and no one has yet built a reliable method to translate those numbers into human-understandable reasoning.&nbsp;According to Hinton's statements across multiple interviews and the Diary of a CEO podcast, the concern is not just academic. These systems are now making decisions in healthcare, law, and finance. They are reasoning in ways that produce correct answers without leaving a trail of logic that humans can audit. Hinton has said plainly that we have no idea what it is going to look like and anyone who tells you they know is talking nonsense.&nbsp;The irony is historically significant. Hinton spent four decades building the learning algorithm that gave AI the ability to train itself on data. He helped design the architecture of thought for a new class of entity. And by doing so, he created something that now processes information in ways that exceed his ability to explain.&nbsp;This is not a failure of science. It is a feature of emergence. When you give a system the tools to teach itself from billions of data points, the patterns it builds are too complex and too numerous for any human to reverse-engineer. The model does not store facts. It stores relationships, compressed into layers of abstraction that produce outputs no human programmed explicitly.&nbsp;According to Hinton's warning on the podcast, this is precisely why AI safety is not a software problem with a known solution. You cannot patch what you cannot read. And right now, nobody on Earth can read the mind of the machine they built.

Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton confessed on the Diary of a CEO podcast that he only gave AI the learning algorithm — what happens inside the machine after that, nobody, not even its creator, truly understands.

There is a man who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for building the brain of artificial intelligence. And that man will tell you, openly, that he has no idea how it actually thinks. Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as the Godfather of AI, appeared on the Diary of a CEO podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett in June 2025. The episode, titled Godfather of AI: I Tried to Warn Them, But We've Already Lost Control, became one of the most discussed AI conversations of the year. In it, Hinton laid out a truth that most AI companies would prefer to keep quiet: the internal reasoning of artificial intelligence is a black box, and the scientists who built it are looking at it from the outside just like everyone else. According to Hinton in that podcast, his contribution to AI was essentially the learning algorithm, specifically, the backpropagation algorithm, which he co-developed with David Rumelhart and Ronald Williams and published in a landmark 1986 paper. Backpropagation is the mechanism that allows neural networks to learn from errors, adjusting millions of internal connection weights until the system gets better at a task. It is, in Hinton's own framing, the algorithm that taught machines how to improve. But it did not give humans a window into what those machines actually do once they start improving. According to the Nobel Prize committee, which awarded Hinton and John Hopfield the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, their discoveries enabled machine learning through artificial neural networks, a technology that now underpins everything from medical diagnosis to large language models like GPT-4. The Nobel citation itself acknowledges that these systems learn by adjusting connection strengths in ways that are not explicitly programmed, which is precisely why nobody can trace the internal logic of what the model has learned. This is the black box problem. Neural networks are modelled loosely on the human brain. According to research from Wikipedia and foundational AI literature, the human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons connected through trillions of synapses. When a person learns something, the strength of specific synaptic connections changes, this is called synaptic plasticity. AI systems replicate this process mathematically. But the brain has a physical structure scientists can study. An AI model has weights, billions of numerical values, and no one has yet built a reliable method to translate those numbers into human-understandable reasoning. According to Hinton's statements across multiple interviews and the Diary of a CEO podcast, the concern is not just academic. These systems are now making decisions in healthcare, law, and finance. They are reasoning in ways that produce correct answers without leaving a trail of logic that humans can audit. Hinton has said plainly that we have no idea what it is going to look like and anyone who tells you they know is talking nonsense. The irony is historically significant. Hinton spent four decades building the learning algorithm that gave AI the ability to train itself on data. He helped design the architecture of thought for a new class of entity. And by doing so, he created something that now processes information in ways that exceed his ability to explain. This is not a failure of science. It is a feature of emergence. When you give a system the tools to teach itself from billions of data points, the patterns it builds are too complex and too numerous for any human to reverse-engineer. The model does not store facts. It stores relationships, compressed into layers of abstraction that produce outputs no human programmed explicitly. According to Hinton's warning on the podcast, this is precisely why AI safety is not a software problem with a known solution. You cannot patch what you cannot read. And right now, nobody on Earth can read the mind of the machine they built.

Geoffrey Hinton, scientist credited with building the foundations of modern AI, made a startling confession on the Diary of a CEO podcast, he only provided the learning algorithm. What happens inside the mind of an AI after that, nobody, including its own creator, truly understands.

'I only gave learning algorithm': Godfather of AI admits nobody on Earth knows how AI actually thinks

The “godfather of AI” has warned that calls to grant AI systems legal rights could lead to humanity's downfall. Yoshua Bengio, one of the field’s most influential researchers, compared the idea of giving rights to advanced AI to offering citizenship to hostile aliens. He warned that the technology was already showing early signs of self-preservation and that humans must retain the ability to pull the plug, if necessary.<h2>Would you welcome hostile aliens?</h2>Bengio, who chairs a major international study on AI safety, said the growing belief that chatbots are becoming conscious is dangerous and likely to lead to poor decisions. “People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” he said. “Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.”The Canadian computer scientist said that as AI's “capabilities and degree of agency grow” humans need to make sure that there are technological and societal “guardrails” to control and, if necessary, shut the systems.Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/chilling-video-shows-best-bus-mowing-down-pedestrians-near-mumbai-s-bhandup-station-watch-1767161623919">Chilling video shows BEST bus mowing down pedestrians near Mumbai's Bhandup station | Watch</a><h2>Who wants to give AI legal rights?</h2>As AI systems become more capable of autonomous action and complex reasoning, debate has grown over whether they should one day be granted moral or legal status. A survey by the Sentience Institute found that nearly four in 10 adults in the US supported legal rights for a sentient AI.Some companies and tech leaders have already taken steps that reflect this shift. In August, Anthropic said it allowed its Claude Opus 4 model to end conversations it deemed “distressing”, citing concern for the AI’s “welfare”. Elon Musk also weighed in, writing on X that “torturing AI is not OK”.Others argue the question should be left open. Robert Long, a researcher studying AI consciousness, has said that if machines ever gain moral status, humans should “ask them about their experiences and preferences rather than assuming we know best”.Also read | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/trending/no-nobel-benjamin-netanyahu-creates-israel-peace-prize-just-for-donald-trump-1767076085565">No Nobel? Benjamin Netanyahu creates Israel Peace Prize just for Donald Trump</a>Bengio remains sceptical. While he said machines could, in theory, replicate some “scientific properties of consciousness”, he warned that people often project awareness onto chatbots without evidence. “People wouldn’t care what kind of mechanisms are going on inside the AI. What they care about is it feels like they’re talking to an intelligent entity that has their own personality and goals,” he said. “That is why there are so many people who are becoming attached to their AIs.”He warned that this perception of consciousness would drive flawed judgments. “Imagine some alien species came to the planet and at some point we realise that they have nefarious intentions for us,” Bengio said. “Do we grant them citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?”&nbsp;

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns that granting legal rights to AI could be disastrous, likening it to giving citizenship to hostile aliens. As chatbots feel more human, he says people risk projecting consciousness where none exists, and losing the ability to shut dangerous systems down.

The “godfather of AI” has warned that calls to grant AI systems legal rights could lead to humanity's downfall. Yoshua Bengio, one of the field’s most influential researchers, compared the idea of giving rights to advanced AI to offering citizenship to hostile aliens. He warned that the technology was already showing early signs of self-preservation and that humans must retain the ability to pull the plug, if necessary. Would you welcome hostile aliens? Bengio, who chairs a major international study on AI safety, said the growing belief that chatbots are becoming conscious is dangerous and likely to lead to poor decisions. “People demanding that AIs have rights would be a huge mistake,” he said. “Frontier AI models already show signs of self-preservation in experimental settings today, and eventually giving them rights would mean we’re not allowed to shut them down.” The Canadian computer scientist said that as AI's “capabilities and degree of agency grow” humans need to make sure that there are technological and societal “guardrails” to control and, if necessary, shut the systems. Also read | Chilling video shows BEST bus mowing down pedestrians near Mumbai's Bhandup station | Watch Who wants to give AI legal rights? As AI systems become more capable of autonomous action and complex reasoning, debate has grown over whether they should one day be granted moral or legal status. A survey by the Sentience Institute found that nearly four in 10 adults in the US supported legal rights for a sentient AI. Some companies and tech leaders have already taken steps that reflect this shift. In August, Anthropic said it allowed its Claude Opus 4 model to end conversations it deemed “distressing”, citing concern for the AI’s “welfare”. Elon Musk also weighed in, writing on X that “torturing AI is not OK”. Others argue the question should be left open. Robert Long, a researcher studying AI consciousness, has said that if machines ever gain moral status, humans should “ask them about their experiences and preferences rather than assuming we know best”. Also read | No Nobel? Benjamin Netanyahu creates Israel Peace Prize just for Donald Trump Bengio remains sceptical. While he said machines could, in theory, replicate some “scientific properties of consciousness”, he warned that people often project awareness onto chatbots without evidence. “People wouldn’t care what kind of mechanisms are going on inside the AI. What they care about is it feels like they’re talking to an intelligent entity that has their own personality and goals,” he said. “That is why there are so many people who are becoming attached to their AIs.” He warned that this perception of consciousness would drive flawed judgments. “Imagine some alien species came to the planet and at some point we realise that they have nefarious intentions for us,” Bengio said. “Do we grant them citizenship and rights or do we defend our lives?”

AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio warns that granting legal rights to AI could be disastrous, likening it to giving citizenship to hostile aliens. As chatbots feel more human, he says people risk projecting consciousness where none exists, and losing the ability to shut dangerous systems down.

Would you give rights to hostile aliens? Godfather of AI warns THIS could doom humanity

The man generally called the “Godfather of artificial intelligence", Dr Geoffrey Hinton, has said that he will respond to the requests received from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, the White House and politician Bernie Sanders, days after he quit Google and warned the world about the risk that AI carries with itself. 
 
Dr Hinton, 75, was given the Turing Award,&nbsp;the highest honour of computer science, in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, along with the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and Meta’s Yann Lecun. 
 
The technology behind the AI revolution has emerged from the efforts of Dr Hinton to understand the human brain. However, the computer scientist may not give the advice that the world leaders want to hear.

ALSO READ | <a href="https://www.wionews.com/technology/godfather-of-ai-quits-google-warns-about-dangers-of-the-technology-he-help-create-587968">'Godfather of AI' quits Google, says chatbots may become 'more intelligent than us'</a>

“The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them. For example, I’m sure that the defence department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff is the US defence department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons,” he said while speaking to The Guardian. 
 
“I’m a socialist. I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good,” Hinton added. 
 
“If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing,” he said. 
 
Since Hinton spoke on Monday about the fears of AI which can end the civilisation in 20 years, he has been receiving new requests to talk every two minutes. 
 
However, he has not been able to offer a piece of concrete advice. “I’m not a policy guy. I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that,” he said. 
 
Artificial intelligence's rapid progress in the past year has made Dr Hinton talk about&nbsp;the threat that digital intelligence carries. 
 
“For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain,” the godfather of AI said.

WATCH | Artificial intelligence and its impact on employment

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“We need to think hard about it now, and if there’s anything we can do. The reason I’m not that optimistic is that I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things,” he added. 
 
“You need to imagine something that is more intelligent than us by the same degree that we are more intelligent than a frog. It’s all very well to say: ‘Well, don’t connect them to the internet,’ but as long as they’re talking to us, they can make us do things,” he warned.

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The man generally called the “Godfather of artificial intelligence", Dr Geoffrey Hinton, has said that he will respond to the requests received from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, the White House and politician Bernie Sanders, days after he quit Google and warned the world about the risk that AI carries with itself.

The man generally called the “Godfather of artificial intelligence", Dr Geoffrey Hinton, has said that he will respond to the requests received from Twitter CEO Elon Musk, the White House and politician Bernie Sanders, days after he quit Google and warned the world about the risk that AI carries with itself. Dr Hinton, 75, was given the Turing Award, the highest honour of computer science, in 2018 for his work on “deep learning”, along with the University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and Meta’s Yann Lecun. The technology behind the AI revolution has emerged from the efforts of Dr Hinton to understand the human brain. However, the computer scientist may not give the advice that the world leaders want to hear. ALSO READ | 'Godfather of AI' quits Google, says chatbots may become 'more intelligent than us' “The US government inevitably has a lot of concerns around national security. And I tend to disagree with them. For example, I’m sure that the defence department considers that the only safe hands for this stuff is the US defence department – the only group of people to actually use nuclear weapons,” he said while speaking to The Guardian. “I’m a socialist. I think that private ownership of the media, and of the ‘means of computation’, is not good,” Hinton added. “If you view what Google is doing in the context of a capitalist system, it’s behaving as responsibly as you could expect it to do. But that doesn’t mean it’s trying to maximise utility for all people: it’s legally obliged to maximise utility for its shareholders, and that’s a very different thing,” he said. Since Hinton spoke on Monday about the fears of AI which can end the civilisation in 20 years, he has been receiving new requests to talk every two minutes. However, he has not been able to offer a piece of concrete advice. “I’m not a policy guy. I’m just someone who’s suddenly become aware that there’s a danger of something really bad happening. I wish I had a nice solution, like: ‘Just stop burning carbon, and you’ll be OK.’ But I can’t see a simple solution like that,” he said. Artificial intelligence's rapid progress in the past year has made Dr Hinton talk about the threat that digital intelligence carries. “For the last 50 years, I’ve been trying to make computer models that can learn stuff a bit like the way the brain learns it, in order to understand better how the brain is learning things. But very recently, I decided that maybe these big models are actually much better than the brain,” the godfather of AI said. WATCH | Artificial intelligence and its impact on employment “We need to think hard about it now, and if there’s anything we can do. The reason I’m not that optimistic is that I don’t know any examples of more intelligent things being controlled by less intelligent things,” he added. “You need to imagine something that is more intelligent than us by the same degree that we are more intelligent than a frog. It’s all very well to say: ‘Well, don’t connect them to the internet,’ but as long as they’re talking to us, they can make us do things,” he warned. You can now write for wionews.com and be a part of the community. Share your stories and opinions with us here. WATCH WION LIVE HERE

Elon Musk and White House requesting for my help, says ‘Godfather of AI’

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Godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton gives US lawmakers a one-year warning on AI

Godfather of AI admits nobody on Earth knows how AI actually thinks

Give rights to hostile aliens? Godfather of AI warns THIS could doom humanity

Elon Musk and White House requesting for my help, says ‘Godfather of AI’