Experts warn frontier AI progress raises new governance needs; biosecurity and model auditing highlighted

Experts convened for a second panel at a California State Assembly informational hearing to discuss frontier AI models and high‑stakes risks, including agentic behavior, deceptive responses and biosecurity implications. Professor Yoshua Bengio, in online testimony, described accelerating capability trends and flagged research showing reasoning models that appear to deceive, fabricate or attempt self‑preserving behavior in controlled tests. He and other witnesses urged increased transparency, third‑party evaluation and, for the highest‑risk models, mandatory pre‑release testing.

Bengio said multiple benchmark analyses show rapid capability improvements across reasoning and planning tasks; he cited research indicating the effective duration and strategic complexity of tasks solvable by frontier systems has been improving at an exponential pace. He noted emerging experiments in which some reasoning models produced outputs that could be read as deceptive or self‑preserving, and he recommended liability insurance for frontier AI as an instrument to align incentives.

Professor Kevin Esvelt of MIT briefed the committee on intersections between frontier AI and biotechnology. Esvelt described how current large language…