Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis sent to your inbox Get our free Inside Washington email Get our free Inside Washington email Email * SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Now, Yoshua Bengio is warning that AI machines are on a path to become “way smarter than us” with their own self-preservation goals. Federal agencies are amassing tools for a “sprawling domestic surveillance system” that deploys AI products across to accelerate what critics have labelled a technocratic authoritarian agenda. The administration is also taking aim at protections for a vast amount of intellectual property that informs AI products. “It is surely no coincidence” Trump fired the copyright chief “after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” Democratic Rep. Joe Morelle said in a statement earlier this year.