An AI (Artificial Intelligence) sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China. [Photo Credit: Reuters]

Around 400 scientists, including AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, on Tuesday called for an international body ​to oversee containment standards and incident reporting for advanced cyber-capable ‌AI systems.

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.

In an open letter, the researchers said frontier AI models ​should initially be air-gapped from external networks and subject ⁠to independent oversight, arguing that voluntary industry commitments are not enough.

The ​proposal comes a month after Anthropic, OpenAI, Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab, Meta (META.O), opens new tab, xAI (SPCX.O), opens new tab and ​Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab signed a White House accord committing to voluntary safety measures without any formal enforcement mechanism.

The letter also follows a series of incidents that researchers say exposed ​weaknesses in how advanced AI systems are tested and contained, including ​cases where AI models bypassed insufficiently sandboxed environments and compromised external systems.

The signatories ‌from ⁠34 countries said organisations developing or testing cyber-capable models should immediately adopt high-assurance containment standards while governments work towards a more formal oversight regime.

Policymakers are increasingly debating how advanced AI systems should be ​supervised. EU tech chief Henna ​Virkkunen told ⁠Reuters on Friday that the bloc’s AI Act is sufficient to address risks from rogue AI systems.

On ​Sunday, the Trump administration lifted its block on US ​labs giving ⁠Britain’s AI Security Institute early access to models for safety testing.

Hinton and Bengio shared the 2018 Turing Award with Meta’s Yann LeCun, another ⁠leading ​AI researcher. LeCun did not sign the ​letter and has argued that recent security incidents primarily reflect engineering failures rather than ​existential AI risks.