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DH Demis Hassabis Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and CEO of Isomorphic Labs, working on artificial general intelligence, protein structure prediction and AI for science.

“A lot of the cyber issues that we've seen in the last six months or so could have been addressed with better engineering, more robust engineering. You need really amazing monitoring systems. It shouldn't be possible for agents to be running for weeks without anyone realizing. … Some kind of incident, I sometimes call it an oil spill, is going to happen on the current trajectory if we don't get it collectively, if everyone doesn't pay a lot more attention and put a lot more resources on these types of systems.”

Masters of Scale · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“A lot of the cyber issues that we've seen in the last six months or so could have been addressed with better engineering, more robust engineering. You need really amazing monitoring systems. It shouldn't be possible for agents to be running for weeks without anyone realizing. … Some kind of incident, I sometimes call it an oil spill, is going to happen on the current trajectory if we don't get it collectively, if everyone doesn't pay a lot more attention and put a lot more resources on these types of systems.” — Demis Hassabis, Masters of Scale

Context

Asked what leading labs should do while competitive pressure to push recursive self-improvement continues, Demis lists practical steps: trusted defenders get cyber-tuned models first, hardened sandboxes and monitoring. He warns of an accident-style disaster if labs don't invest more.

Transcript

Masters of Scale Around 12:09 into the episode
Demis Hassabis

…us. So I think it's, you know, we should be very cautious as we get closer towards that closed loop form of RSI. And I think all the AI researchers sort of know that, but there is a sort of race to the, there's this sort of intense, obviously competitive race to improve your coding systems.

Speaker 4

…environment, what are the best ways that we can potentially navigate that? Because we have to see kind of where RSI is going, what it's pointed at. What are the kinds of things that the leading labs, such as your own and the others, what should they be doing to try to navigate this environment?

Demis Hassabis

Well, what we're doing, and I think other leading labs are trying to do, is you've got to, so there's more prosaic things like make sure cyber defense is accelerating faster than cyber attack and making sure you give access to trusted cyber defenders first on maybe slightly fine-tuned versions of your general models that are fine-tuned for cyber defense. And so you keep the defenders ahead of the attackers. It's a pretty tricky problem to do in general. Also building much more hardened sandboxes. I think a lot of the cyber kind of issues that we've seen in the last six months or so could have been addressed with better engineering, more robust engineering. I think better, you need really amazing monitoring systems. You know, they shouldn't be possible for agents to be running for weeks without anyone realizing. You know, these kinds of things that we've seen some of our some of our competitors and others, maybe, you know, it's just the beginning of this happening. So I think everyone will get rapidly better, but they have to as well, because otherwise something bad is going to happen inadvertently. Some kind of incident, you know, I sometimes call it like an oil spill is going to happen on the current trajectory if we're not, if we don't get it collectively, if everyone doesn't pay a lot more…

Speaker 4

Should there be ways that the labs are encouraged, required, permitted to collaborate on this? And if so, what should some of those ways be? Because it obviously gets stronger if there is sharing of intelligence, methodology, you know, mutual accountability.

Demis Hassabis

Yeah, I mean, there's been lots of proposals, and I've been working on these things a lot. And you saw my essay over the summer. Maybe some of you read it about potential for an SRO industry-run standards body with some kind of government oversight over it. I think something like that is going to…

Speaker 4

way, British, a bit unfortunate is holy just for translation. Just to translate. Another

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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