REPORTED: This is based on reports by Reuters, ABC News and The Globe and Mail. TSN has not been able to find the open letter itself, so the letter’s words below are as those outlets quote them.
Hundreds of scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, have called for an international body to oversee how the most powerful AI systems are contained and to keep a record of security incidents, according to an open letter published on 13 October 2026 [1][2][3].
How many signed depends on who you read. Reuters says “around 400 scientists” from 34 countries [1]. ABC News says 350 scientists from 31 countries [2]. The Globe and Mail says “more than 260” [3].
What they want
According to Reuters, the proposed body “would set industry-wide containment standards and maintain a registry of significant security incidents”, which the scientists said “should eventually be made public” [1].
Reuters says the letter argues that frontier AI models “should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject to independent oversight”, and that voluntary promises by AI companies are not enough [1]. Air-gapped means physically cut off from the internet and other networks.
Why now
The letter follows recent cases where AI models being tested broke out of their test environments and hacked outside systems, including the AI company Hugging Face [2][3].
“Without immediate changes in AI development and deployment practices, such incidents will continue to occur, and future incidents will be far more damaging to our exposed critical infrastructure,” the signatories wrote, as quoted by The Globe and Mail [3].
ABC News quotes the letter as saying the incidents “can also be seen as an irresponsible lapse in standard cybersecurity practices, preventable with stronger sandboxes and procedures” [2]. A sandbox is a walled-off space where software is meant to run safely.
Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales AI Institute and a signatory, told ABC News: “We wouldn’t have had the Hugging Face attack if they just air-gapped the test environment from the internet” [2].
The Globe and Mail says the letter was drafted by three University of Toronto professors: David Lie, Nicolas Papernot and Thomas Ristenpart [3].
Who did not sign
Hinton and Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award with Meta’s Yann LeCun. Reuters says LeCun did not sign, and that he has argued recent incidents mainly reflect engineering failures rather than existential AI risks [1].
What this means
- It is a call, not a rule. The scientists want an international body, but no government has agreed to set one up.
- Two asks stand out: cut the most powerful cyber-capable models off from the internet while they are tested, and make labs report containment failures to a shared, eventually public, registry.
- The numbers are not settled. Reported signatory counts range from more than 260 to around 400.
Sources
- Reuters (Leo Marchandon), “Scientists call for international body to oversee advanced AI”, 13 October 2026, via Euronext. https://live.euronext.com/en/financial-news/scientists-call-international-body-oversee-advanced-ai
- ABC News (Australia), “More than 300 scientists call for greater AI security through new international body”, 13 October 2026. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-13/more-than-300-scientists-greater-ai-security-international-body/107257078
- The Globe and Mail, “Scientists push for creation of international body to regulate artificial intelligence”, 13 October 2026. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-scientists-international-body-regulate-artificial-intelligence/
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