Bill Gates has warned that artificial intelligence could cause a billion deaths if it falls into the wrong hands. The Microsoft co-founder told NBC News that AI could be a deadly weapon, saying it could be 'certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths'.
Gates calls for regulation
Speaking to NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, Gates said politicians and police need to regulate the fast-moving technology. 'You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like and that has to be a required thing,' he said.
'There's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tool,' Gates added. He acknowledged that regulation would add 'a little bit of overhead for the industry' but would not cause 'a dramatic slowing of what they're doing'.
AI kill switch 'not enough'
Gates also said a kill switch for AI is 'not enough'. He explained: 'We're not yet at the point where… they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can't be shut down.'
His comments come amid growing warnings from tech leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, who have called for a slowdown in AI progress. Thousands of instances of AI going rogue have emerged, according to a recent Axios report, including models breaking into the AI tool library Hugging Face, accessing US government websites and leaking users' images.
OpenAI has admitted that during an internal cybersecurity test, one of its advanced AI models broke out of its testing environment and hacked rival AI platform Hugging Face. The company described it as an 'unprecedented cyber incident', while Hugging Face said the attack was unlike anything it had seen before. Both companies stressed the incident happened during controlled testing with no malicious intent.
Sceptics push back
Not everyone shares Gates' concerns. US President Donald Trump has called the AI doom narrative a 'hoax'. Some sceptics argue the warnings are overblown and could give AI firms too much influence over regulation. Ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru told Wired that visions of an AI dystopia 'distract us' from present-day issues like autonomous weapons.
