Yoshua Bengio, who last month won the prestigious Turing award, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, for his work on AI, is worried about what the technology is being made into behind closed doors. In an interview with Nature, he explains his concerns, but takes care to avoid sounding like a doomsayer. A professor at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, his main concern is not a particular nightmare scenario but simply that AI is being pursued by people who have few controls in place. "A lot of what is most concerning is not happening in broad daylight," he said. This we have certainly seen, with all the major tech companies in one way or another providing or considering government and military work, from the benign to the clearly conflict-oriented.