Bill Gates says AI without regulation is ‘completely irresponsible’

The billionaire cofounder of Microsoft says without restrictions, AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’.

Not requiring AI to have safeguards and be subject to outside monitoring is “completely irresponsible” and could lead to global harm to humanity, said tech mogul Bill Gates, in a series of media appearances where the philanthropist weighed in on global discussions concerning how to regulate the technology.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion of what safeguards and monitoring looks like,” Gates said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, parts of which aired on Sunday.

Gates warned that the technology was “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” Ensuring that did not happen, he said, could be a more difficult task than other existential threats, such as slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The tech pioneer turned philanthropist said he was willing to speak with US President Donald Trump to convey his concerns directly and disagreed with his characterisation of recent warnings over the danger AI posed as a “hoax”.

“I hope that, given ⁠⁠my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said in the interview.

In recent weeks, the heads of leading AI companies have said publicly that their industry needs frameworks and guardrails to ensure the technology does not outpace human oversight, spin out of control and prove to be catastrophic for the world.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, told members of the United Nations Security Council last week.

But Trump and senior officials in his administration have baulked at imposing regulations on the multi-trillion-dollar industry, which they say is part of a race between the US and China.

On Saturday, the day after meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss AI, Trump repeated his scepticism of the warnings and said he would not regulate the industry. He compared the apocalyptic warnings to other issues he is dismissive of, such as climate change and Russian interference in US elections. “It’s just like, everybody’s going to be dead, you’re all supposed to be dead now because of global warming. It’s like Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. All of these different hoaxes,” Trump said.

Gates told CNN that the kind of safeguards needed for AI development would not harm the industry.

“The amount of slowing down is not going to be that dramatic,” he said. “To have a monitoring or policing layer that says, is this being used for a cyberattack, is this being used for bio-terrorism, that can be done.”

The 70-year-old co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 and ran it during an era of widespread consumer adoption of personal computers and later the internet. He became the richest person in the world in 1995, and retained that spot throughout much of the next two decades, before giving much of his wealth away for philanthropic causes and being replaced by a new generation of tech moguls, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Earlier this month, his philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, said it was committing $1bn to expand AI access in the developing world.