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Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence (AI) Institute, and was its scientific director until 2025.
Bengio received the 2018 Turing Award, often referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing", together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for their foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI". Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In November 2025, Bengio became the first AI researcher with more than a million Google Scholar citations. In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people.
Bengio is the brother of Samy Bengio, also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is senior director of AI and Machine learning research at Apple.
The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there. His father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in Judeo-Arabic. His mother, Célia Moreno, was an actress in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Saddiki. She studied economics in Paris, and then in Montreal in 1980 she co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l’ Écran humain, a multimedia theater troupe.
Along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio is considered by journalist Cade Metz to be one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Bengio et al. introduced the neural probabilistic language model, which learned distributed representations (word embeddings) for words to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" in natural language processing. Among the computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio was as of 2018 the one with the most recent citations per day, according to MILA. As of August 2024, he has the highest Discipline H-index (D-index, a measure of the research citations a scientist has received) of any computer scientist. Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an Erdős number of 3.
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor.
Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery. At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. An interim version of the report was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, and covered issues such as the potential for cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios. The full report was published in January 2025 as the International AI Safety Report.
In June 2025, The Guardian reported that Bengio had launched a nonprofit organization, LawZero, aimed at building "honest" AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by Autonomous agent. The group is developing a system called Scientist AI, intended to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an agent’s actions could cause harm. Bengio told the paper that the project’s first goal was to demonstrate the methodology and then scale it up with support from donors, governments, or AI labs. LawZero’s funders include the Future of Life Institute and Schmidt Sciences.
In May 2023, Bengio stated in an interview to BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work. He raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products.
Speaking with the Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio said that he supported the monitoring of access to AI systems such as ChatGPT so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked. In July 2023, he published a piece in The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now."
Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others in support of SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training models which cost more than $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They claimed the legislation was the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology."
In June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that some advanced AI systems were beginning to display traits such as deception, reward hacking, and situational awareness. He described these as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. In a Fortune article, he stated that the AI arms race was encouraging companies to prioritize capability improvements over safety research. He has also voiced support for strong regulation and international collaboration to address risks posed by advanced AI systems. In December 2025, Bengio criticized calls to grant legal status to AI systems, stating that doing so would be a "huge mistake".
In 2020, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research" with his peers LeCun, Hinton and Demis Hassabis. In 2023, Bengio was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour, France's highest order of merit.
In August 2023, he was appointed to a United Nations scientific advisory council on technological advances.
He was recognized as a 2023 ACM Fellow.
In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the 100 most influential people globally. In the same year, he was awarded VinFuture Prize's grand prize along with Hinton, LeCun, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li for pioneering advancements in neural networks and deep learning algorithms.
In 2025 he was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering jointly with Bill Dally, Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Huang and Fei-Fei Li. Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering 2025
In 2025, he was a recipient of an honorary doctorate from McGill University.
In 2025, he was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec.
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