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PARIS: More than 700 scientists, political figures and celebrities including Prince Harry, Richard Branson and Steve Bannon on Wednesday called for an end to the development of artificial intelligence capable of outsmarting humans.
“The initiative calls for a prohibition on the development of superintelligence until the technology is reliably safe and controllable, and has public buy-in,” according to an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute, a US-based NGO that campaigns against the dangers of AI.
Signatories include the “Godfather of AI” and 2024 winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics Geoffrey Hinton; Computer Sciences Professor at the University of California in Berkeley Stuart Russell; and the world’s most-cited AI scientist Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal.
A raft of other public figures have signed: Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, US President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, and former president Barack Obama’s national security adviser Susan Rice.
The initiative is also endorsed by the Vatican’s AI expert Paolo Benanti and celebrities such as Prince Harry and his wife Meghan, and the US singer will.i.am.
Most major AI developers are striving for artificial general intelligence (AGI), a stage where AI would match all human intellectual capabilities, and even superintelligence, which would exceed them.
Speaking at an event organized by the media group Axel Springer in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, whose company created ChatGPT, said that superintelligence could be achieved within the next five years.
Future of Life Institute President Max Tegmark told AFP that companies should not aim for such an objective without any regulatory framework.
“Many people want powerful AI tools for science, medicine, productivity, and other benefits,” the co-founder of the institute Anthony Aguirre added on Wednesday.
“But the path AI corporations are taking, of racing toward smarter-than-human AI that is designed to replace people, is wildly out of step with what the public wants, scientists think is safe, or religious leaders feel is right.”
The open letter echoes another, published one month ago by AI researchers and sector workers during the United Nations General Assembly, which called for governments “to reach an international agreement on red lines for AI” by the end of 2026.

TOKYO: The spouse of Japan’s first woman Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi hopes to support her by being a “stealth husband,” cooking meals but staying out of the spotlight.
“Unlike in the West, it is better for a partner to stay out of the spotlight,” Fukui Television quoted Taku Yamamoto, 73, as saying on Tuesday after Takaichi became premier.
He said it was essential that Takaichi, who won the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) leadership this month, can “pursue her vision of Prime Minister.”
“I want to provide solid support as ‘a stealth husband’ to ensure that my presence does not become an obstacle to that,” he added, according to the Asahi newspaper, Fuji Television and other media.
Yamamoto, a former LDP lawmaker, married Takaichi in 2004, but the couple divorced in 2017 citing “differences in political views.”
They re-married in 2021, after Yamamoto reportedly supported Takaichi when she ran unsuccessfully for the LDP leadership contest that year. In the subsequent snap election he lost his seat.
License to cook
Takaichi’s views on gender place the 64-year-old on the right of an already conservative LDP.
She named only two other women to her cabinet, with Satsuki Katayama as finance minister and Kimi Onoda as economic security minister.
Takaichi opposes revising a 19th-century law requiring married couples to share the same surname, a rule that overwhelmingly results in women taking their husband’s name.
This is despite the difficulties that the law has given the couple.
During Takaichi and Yamamoto’s first marriage, she took his name for official purposes. In the second, he took hers.
They live in a housing complex for members of parliament in Tokyo, where Takaichi helps care for Yamamoto after he suffered a stroke this year and was also diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2024, reports said.
Media reports said that he first proposed to Takaichi in 2004 over the phone.
He told her that “as I have a chef’s license, I’ll make sure you eat delicious food throughout your life,” Jiji Press reported.
Takaichi, an admirer of Margaret Thatcher and a heavy metal drummer in her youth, said that he “was a rather unsociable person, someone I would say I wasn’t very comfortable to be with.”
But he won her over, saying “if you’re seriously looking for a marriage partner, I’m divorced so I’ll run as a candidate,” Takaichi said on her website.
Takaichi had lost her parliamentary seat in 2003 but regained it two years later, so both of them became parliament members.
Since Takaichi was not good at cooking, he continued to prepare meals, saying, “the kitchen is my domain, so please don’t enter,” Jiji said.