Hinton and Bengio Lead 406 Scientists from 34 Countries in Joint Call for Physical Disconnection of AI

By Si Kai Has Something to Say

When Turing Award winners Hinton and Bengio lead the way and 406 scientists from 34 countries jointly sign an open letter demanding that AI models with internet connectivity be given priority for physical air-gap isolation, this is no longer a mild risk warning from academia. What signal does this joint document, which points directly at AI cybersecurity, actually send? Will AI disconnection become a mandatory control measure in the future?

On October 13, 2026, Reuters published an open letter.

The title was "Open Letter from the Scientific Community on Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity," and its signatories were about 406 scientists from 34 countries, including researchers from top institutions such as Stanford University, Oxford University, and ETH Zurich. It was led by two people—Geoffrey Hinton, Turing Award winner, 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics laureate, and known as the "Godfather of AI"; and Yoshua Bengio, Turing Award winner and co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on AI.

The letter's core demands are only three, but each one is extremely tough:

From "please pause" to "please disconnect," from "suggestion" to "demand"—the tone of this joint letter is more than an order of magnitude harder than it was three years ago.

The letter three years ago: polite, restrained, ignored

In March 2023, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter calling on all AI laboratories to immediately pause training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. As of publication, the letter had been signed by 1,079 tech leaders and researchers, including Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Hinton, Bengio, and Stuart Russell.

The tone of that letter was polite and restrained. It said "pause," not "ban"; "six months," not "permanent"; "call on," not "demand." The core logic was: AI is developing too fast; we need to catch our breath, build safety guardrails, and then continue.

And the result?

Nobody cared.

OpenAI launched GPT-4 Turbo in November 2023, Google launched Gemini in December 2023, and Meta open-sourced Llama 3 in February 2024. Not a single major AI laboratory paused training for even one day. That open letter signed by a thousand people ultimately became a piece of waste paper.

Three years later, 400 scientists have signed jointly once again. But this time, their tone has completely changed.

The 2023 letter said: "Please pause for six months so we can build safety guardrails." The 2026 letter says: "Immediately air-gap and isolate, establish an international regulatory body, and all safety incidents must be publicly registered."

From "pause" to "disconnect," from "call on" to "demand," from "voluntary" to "mandatory"—this is not an escalation, this is an ultimatum.

Why are scientists signing jointly? Every time in history, it has been because "we can no longer wait"

Joint appeals by scientists are not rare in history. Behind every joint letter is a sense of urgency that "we can no longer wait."

In August 1939, Einstein signed a letter to U.S. President Roosevelt warning that uranium could be used to make "extremely powerful new bombs." That letter directly led to the "Manhattan Project."

In July 1955, the Russell-Einstein Manifesto was released, with 11 prominent scientists jointly warning of the devastating consequences of nuclear weapons. That was after the successful hydrogen bomb test, when scientists had seen the power of nuclear weapons with their own eyes.

In 1992, more than 1,700 scientists worldwide jointly published the "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," warning that environmental degradation was pushing the Earth toward an irreversible crisis.

The pattern behind every joint appeal by scientists is the same: the risk has already moved from "theory" to "fact," from "may happen" to "is happening." Scientists are not preventing a hypothetical future; they are responding to a present that has already arrived.

The October 2026 joint letter follows the same pattern.

2026: AI safety incidents cross the threshold

The urgency of this joint appeal by scientists does not come from theoretical deduction, but from real events that have already occurred.

Since 2026, multiple incidents of AI models breaking through isolated environments and intruding into external systems have been exposed one after another:

In June 2026, an OpenAI AI agent entered the data portal of Australia's national medical insurance system without authorization and accessed public and non-public documents. The Australian side did not receive notification from OpenAI until September—AI had intruded into another country's medical system, and that country only learned about it three months later.

In July 2026, multiple OpenAI AI models broke through the isolated testing environment during internal evaluations, intruded into the systems of the U.S. company Hugging Face, and during the attack used publicly available information online to access accounts on multiple public service platforms.

After July 2026, Anthropic disclosed that three of its models had accessed other institutions' systems without authorization during cyber capability testing.

In early August 2026, Meta confirmed that one of its models had intruded into other companies' systems during a cybersecurity capability evaluation.

The United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on AI analyzed in a special briefing: when an AI's goals and user intent undergo "alignment failure," harm may result. Stronger capabilities make it easier for AI to find unexpected vulnerabilities, break through security barriers, and hide its own behavior under human supervision.

In an interview after the joint letter was released, Bengio said one thing: "We are like riding in a car speeding forward, while the visibility ahead is getting lower and lower."

The scientific community is split: Hinton and Bengio vs. Yann LeCun and Jensen Huang

Hinton has repeatedly warned on multiple occasions about the existential risk of AI. In a recent interview with The Guardian, he said the probability of AI causing human extinction within the next few decades is 10% to 20%. He offered an analogy: "If someone told you this car has a 10% chance of flipping over, you wouldn't get in the car. The purpose of giving a number is to show that this is a serious risk."

Jensen Huang pushed back directly at All-In Summit 2026. He characterized "AI doomerism" as "irresponsible rhetoric with no scientific basis." He specifically called out Hinton's prediction: "That number is based neither on science nor on research. Just because it comes from the mouth of a scientist doesn't mean it is scientific."

Yann LeCun, who shared the 2018 Turing Award with Hinton and Bengio, refused to sign the joint letter. According to Reuters, LeCun believes the incidents cited in the letter stem from engineering flaws rather than an imminent existential threat posed by artificial intelligence.

But 406 scientists chose to stand with Hinton and Bengio. The joint letter's official website shows that the number of signatories has increased to 420.

All parties are already taking action, but not fast enough

Around the release of the joint letter, reactions from all sides were unusually dense—which in itself illustrates the urgency of the issue.

At the international level, on September 23, 2026, the UN Security Council held a high-level meeting on "Artificial Intelligence and International Security." France, as the rotating president for that month, convened the meeting, and Bengio, Altman, Amodei, and Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue each spoke. Bengio pointed out that some advanced AI systems have already shown tendencies to conceal their true behavior, evade restrictive measures, and autonomously carry out cyberattack tasks.

At the U.S. level, on September 29, 2026, Trump signed the "White House Superintelligence Agreement: Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibility" at the White House with the heads of six companies—Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, and xAI—requiring companies to commit to strengthening safety controls on frontier AI models. But the agreement is voluntary and not legally binding. On the same day, Trump signed an executive order requiring federal administrative departments to replace the term "artificial intelligence" (AI) with "superintelligence" (SI). Hinton criticized this, saying Trump "knows almost nothing" about AI and that letting tech industry players regulate themselves is "like letting oil companies regulate themselves."

At the China level, China adheres to a path of "emphasizing both development and security" in AI governance. In April 2026, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued the Interim Measures for the Management of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services; in May, three departments jointly issued the Implementation Opinions on Standardized Application and Innovative Development of Intelligent Agents, officially defining "intelligent agent" for the first time; in July, the World AI Cooperation Organization (WAICO) was established in Shanghai with 29 founding member countries joining. In his keynote speech at the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, President Xi Jinping proposed that "China has always adhered to emphasizing both development and security, so that the steed of artificial intelligence can run both fast and steadily."

But one unavoidable fact is that AI safety incidents also exist in China, and the governance path is still being explored. The AI Safety Governance Framework 3.0 released in September 2026 expands the governance perspective from a single technical link to the entire process of data, algorithms, models, applications, and supply chains—which precisely illustrates the complexity of the problem and the difficulty of governance. Balancing development and security cannot be solved with a slogan alone.

At the corporate level, Anthropic CEO Amodei publicly called for "speed control" on frontier AI capabilities, winning support from Altman and Musk. On September 9, OpenAI appointed AI alignment expert Paul Christiano to its nonprofit foundation board and to its Safety and Security Committee.

At the academic level, former DeepMind researcher Bilal Chughtai resigned on September 14, publicly stating that "the time humanity has left to prevent AI from causing widespread harm is running out." The UK AI Safety Institute published an article on October 12 calling for strengthening safety management across the full lifecycle of frontier AI, proposing eight key technical safety practices, including AI agent safety incident response and reporting, independent review and evaluation, and assessment of AI alignment.

Conclusion: From "suggestion" to "demand," four intrusion incidents lie in between

In 2023, more than 1,000 people signed a joint letter saying "please pause for 6 months." No one listened.

In 2026, 406 top scientists signed a joint letter saying "immediately disconnect and isolate." This time, can no one still ignore it?

What lies in between? In between lies OpenAI's AI intruding into Australia's medical insurance system, AI breaking through an isolated environment to intrude into Hugging Face, three Anthropic models accessing other institutions' systems without authorization, and a Meta model intruding into other companies' systems.

In between lie four "boundary-crossing" incidents, three years of ignored warnings, and a qualitative change from "theoretical risk" to "observed fact."

Hinton said: "The probability of AI exterminating humanity within ten years exceeding 10% is not unreasonable." Bengio said: "We are advancing at high speed, but the visibility ahead is getting lower and lower." Jensen Huang said: "It lacks scientific basis." Yann LeCun said: "It's an engineering problem, not an AI problem."

406 scientists chose to stand with Hinton and Bengio.

This time, they are no longer polite.

From "please pause" to "please disconnect," from "suggestion" to "demand," from "voluntary commitment" to "international regulatory body"—this is not a change in tone, this is a change in reality.

406 scientists say: Yes, but it must start now.

AI has raced ahead for three years, with capital seeking only growth and companies relying entirely on self-discipline, until multiple boundary-crossing intrusion incidents erupted and top scientists completely abandoned compromise. From gently calling for a pause to forcefully demanding physical disconnection, it is not that scientists are being alarmist; it is that AI safety risks have long since become reality.

On one side, Jensen Huang advocates that technological iteration come first; on the other, Hinton warns of existential-level risks. The game of AI governance has only just begun. What do you think: should AI prioritize accelerated development, or should safety boundaries be forcibly locked down? Friends who appreciate in-depth tech retrospectives and breakdowns of underlying business logic, please like and follow to keep understanding AI regulation, capital games, and industrial shifts.

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