--- description: Find out why Yoshua Bengio made TIME’s list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. title: TIME100 AI 2025: Yoshua Bengio image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt270c5b4584cade34/6998c92f9fbc7c9d39d9a5ae/Yoshua-Bengio.jpg?branch=production&width=2400&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Aug 26, 2025 # Yoshua Bengio Co-president and scientific director, LawZero by [Harry Booth](/author/harry-booth/) ## Harry Booth Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close Booth is a reporter at TIME.  Photo-Illustration by TIME (Courtesy Photo) Yoshua Bengio, whose research laid the groundwork for today’s artificial intelligence—earning him the unofficial distinction as one of the “Godfathers of AI”—has, since early 2023, warned of what he sees as the technology’s potentially catastrophic dangers. Since he first sounded the alarm, new studies have shown early signs of some of Bengio’s gravest concerns, including AI’s ability to [deceive its users](https://time.com/7202312/new-tests-reveal-ai-capacity-for-deception/ "undefined"). Still, the global race to build smarter-than-human systems has intensified. "I'm the most-cited computer scientist in the world,” Bengio, who chaired this year’s [International AI Safety Report](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/international-ai-safety-report-2025 "undefined"), said in a TED Talk in April. “You'd think that people would heed my warnings." Feeling the urgency, in June Bengio took a dramatic step, departing from his leadership role at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, the renowned AI lab he founded in the 1990s, to establish the safety-focused nonprofit [LawZero](https://time.com/7290554/yoshua-bengio-launches-lawzero-for-safer-ai/ "undefined"). Instead of building systems that can autonomously complete tasks, the organization, which has secured over $35 million in philanthropic funding from the [Gates Foundation](https://time.com/collections/time100-philanthropy-2025/7286044/mark-suzman/ "undefined"), [Schmidt Sciences](https://time.com/7012809/eric-schmidt/ "undefined"), and others, will pursue a fundamentally non-agentic “Scientist AI,” Bengio told TIME in June. The aim is to create a powerful tool that, while lacking the autonomy of other AI systems, can generate hypotheses and accelerate scientific progress to “help us solve the challenges of humanity,” he said. Chief among those challenges is ensuring future AI systems remain firmly under human control. “We can use those non-agentic AIs as guardrails that just need to predict whether the action of an agentic AI is dangerous," Bengio says, effectively supplying oversight of AI systems across the industry. Yoshua Bengio: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2025 ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305845/yoshua-bengio-ai/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305845/yoshua-bengio-ai/"},"headline":"Yoshua Bengio","datePublished":"2025-08-26T19:51:03.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T11:54:43.309Z","description":"","url":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305845/yoshua-bengio-ai/","keywords":["Tech","list","franchise","Magazine","Special Project","sponsorshipblock","Accolades","TIME100 AI 2025"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt270c5b4584cade34/6998c92f9fbc7c9d39d9a5ae/Yoshua-Bengio.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Harry Booth","jobTitle":"Booth is a reporter at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/harry-booth/"}],"creator":"Harry Booth","articleSection":"Business","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt270c5b4584cade34/6998c92f9fbc7c9d39d9a5ae/Yoshua-Bengio.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/business/","name":"Business"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-tech/","name":"Tech"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/time100-ai-2025/7305845/yoshua-bengio-ai/","name":"Yoshua Bengio"}}]}] ```