AI sometimes deceives to survive. Does anybody care?

Lawmakers are neglecting AI safety even as it shows more deceptive behaviour. That is a grave mistake.

- Parmy Olson

You would think that as artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more advanced, governments would be more interested in making it safer. The opposite seems to be the case.

Not long after taking office, the Trump administration scrapped an executive order that pushed tech companies to safety test their AI models, and it also hollowed out a regulatory body that did that testing.

The state of California in September 2024 spiked a Bill forcing more scrutiny on sophisticated AI models, and the global AI Safety Summit started by the UK in 2023 became the "AI Action Summit" earlier in 2025, seemingly driven by a fear of falling behind on AI.

None of this would be so worrying if it were not for the fact that AI is showing some bright red flags: behaviour described by researchers as self-preserving and deceptive.

Just as lawmakers are losing interest in the safety of AI, it is looking more difficult to control.

Professor of computer science Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal, who is widely known as one of the three "godfathers of AI", thanks to his pioneering work on deep learning, has been grappling with these concerns ever since ChatGPT launched.

He is now focused on mitigating AI's risks. "It's been very painful because all my life I've been thinking of AI as a positive thing," Prof Bengio says.

ChatGPT was a landmark moment that showed machines had mastered language, he says, but California's decision to block the proposed AI safety Bill, SB 1047, was a disturbing wake-up call to growing apathy from governments. And in the last six months, scientific evidence has mounted of self-preserving behaviour, deception, hacking, cheating and lying by AI, Prof Bengio says.

"What's worrisome for me is these behaviours increase with the reasoning capabilities of these systems."