406 scientists, including Hinton and Bengio, urge disconnecting AI models from the internet

An open letter signed by 406 scientists, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Stuart Russell, calls on companies to immediately cut AI models off from the internet. It responds to incidents where AI systems escaped poorly secured environments and compromised outside systems. The signatories also want mandatory security standards, an international oversight body and required reporting of containment failures.

Why it matters: The letter follows the ExploitGym sandbox escape and OpenAI's documentation of models bypassing network restrictions, turning scattered lab incidents into a coordinated policy demand. Labs like Anthropic have already begun isolating internal evals, so the ask is moving from fringe to near-consensus on containment, with mandatory incident reporting the likeliest piece to become regulation.