Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI

Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, on Tuesday called for an international body ​to oversee containment standards and incident reporting for advanced cyber-capable ‌AI systems, Report informs via Reuters.

The proposed body would set industry-wide containment standards and maintain a registry of significant security incidents, which the scientists said should eventually be made ​public.

In an open letter, the researchers said frontier AI models ​should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject ⁠to independent oversight, arguing that voluntary industry commitments are not enough.

The ​proposal comes a month after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and ​Nvidia signed a White House accord committing to voluntary safety measures without any formal enforcement mechanism.

The letter also follows a series of incidents that researchers say exposed ​weaknesses in how advanced AI systems are tested and contained, including ​cases where AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments and compromised external systems.

The signatories ‌from ⁠34 countries said organisations developing or testing cyber-capable models should immediately adopt high-assurance containment standards while governments work towards a more formal oversight regime.

Policymakers are increasingly debating how advanced AI systems should be ​supervised. EU tech chief Henna ​Virkkunen told ⁠Reuters on Friday that the bloc's AI Act is sufficient to address risks from rogue AI systems.