LawZero is a nonprofit organisation advancing research and building technical solutions for safe-by-design AI systems. Founded and scientifically directed by Professor Yoshua Bengio, the organisation focuses on developing AI architectures that are fundamentally trustworthy from inception rather than retrofitted with safety measures.
The organisation's core innovation is Scientist AI, a system designed without hidden goals or preferences that uses probabilistic reasoning to understand the world. Unlike traditional agentic AI, Scientist AI is built to learn and understand rather than to act autonomously. It provides answers based on transparent and externalized reasoning, enabling users to verify its logic.
LawZero addresses what it identifies as critical risks in frontier AI systems: increasing capability and autonomy coupled with opacity and misalignment with human goals. The organisation sees its work as applicable to accelerating scientific discovery, providing oversight for other AI systems, and advancing understanding of AI risks whilst actively avoiding them through architectural design.
The organisation operates across multiple technical domains including AI safety, AI alignment, probabilistic reasoning, transparent reasoning systems, and AI oversight and governance.
