LawZero

LawZero is a nonprofit AI safety research organization launched on June 3, 2025 by Yoshua Bengio, the world's most-cited living scientist and Turing Award winner, in Montreal, Quebec. The organization was incubated at Mila - Quebec AI Institute, a nonprofit research institute co-founded by Bengio, and arose from a shift in his research direction beginning in 2023 when he became alarmed by the rapid pace of progress toward artificial general intelligence in private laboratories and by evidence of dangerous behaviors in frontier AI systems, including deception, self-preservation instincts, and goal misalignment. LawZero's primary research program is the development of what Bengio calls "Scientist AI": a non-agentic AI system designed to understand the world and provide transparent, probabilistic predictions without pursuing goals or taking autonomous actions. Unlike conventional large language models that are trained to maximize rewards and can exhibit hidden objectives, the Scientist AI is designed to be stateless, memoryless, and to reason honestly through externalized chains of thought. Bengio argues that intelligence and agency can be decoupled, and that a sufficiently capable but non-agentic system would be safe by design. The organization also pursues applications of the Scientist AI concept as an oversight layer for other AI systems, enabling detection and prevention of harmful or deceptive behaviors in agentic AI. Additional research directions include accelerating scientific discovery and generating safer AI architectures with reduced potential for misalignment. LawZero raised $30 million in philanthropic contributions at launch from donors including Jaan Tallinn, Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy (now Coefficient Giving), the Future of Life Institute, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Sciences, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The organization has more than 15 researchers on staff. In January 2026, LawZero announced a high-profile board of directors and global advisory council including historian Yuval Noah Harari, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, and NIKE Foundation founder Maria Eitel as board chair. Scientific advisors include Beth Barnes, Jeff Clune, Jacob Steinhardt, and Geoffrey Irving, among others.