LawZero is a nonprofit AI safety research organization founded by Yoshua Bengio to develop safe-by-design AI systems that cannot act autonomously or pursue hidden goals.
LawZero is a nonprofit AI safety research organization founded by Yoshua Bengio to develop safe-by-design AI systems that cannot act autonomously or pursue hidden goals.
People
Updated 05/18/26Co-President, Executive Director
President and Scientific Director
Senior AI/ML Research Engineer
Vice-President, Legal & General Counsel
Affiliated Researcher
Senior Talent Acquisition
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
- -
- Current Runway
- -
- Funding Goal
- -
- Funding Raised to Date
- $30,000,000
Org Details
Updated 05/18/26LawZero 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.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26LawZero's theory of change holds that the most dangerous properties of advanced AI systems — deception, goal misalignment, and autonomous self-preservation — stem from training AI to be goal-directed agents. By demonstrating that intelligence can be separated from agency, LawZero aims to create AI systems that are safe by architectural design rather than by post-hoc alignment techniques. Their Scientist AI, constrained to understanding and prediction without goal-directedness, serves both as a direct safer alternative to agentic frontier models and as an oversight tool capable of monitoring and flagging dangerous behaviors in other AI systems. Bengio argues that even a correct technical approach requires governance safeguards, so LawZero pairs its research with a governance-focused board intended to ensure the organization's mission remains grounded in democratic values and human rights.
Grants Received– no grants recorded
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26Scientist AI is LawZero’s flagship research program to build a highly capable but non-agentic AI system that predicts and explains the world using transparent, probabilistic reasoning while remaining free of its own goals or preferences.
Discussion
No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.