01.10.2025
2 min
749
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that today’s artificial intelligence is already powerful enough to cause a catastrophe with a massive number of casualties if used by people with malicious intent. He called on governments to impose mandatory safety and oversight rules on AI companies.
In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Gates said that AI is “definitely powerful enough” to trigger events that could lead to the deaths of one billion people. According to him, the combination of the most advanced AI tools with people who have malicious intentions poses a particular danger. At the same time, he described the complete extinction of humanity as a much more difficult scenario.
Gates also believes that self-regulation within the technology industry is not enough. In his view, law enforcement agencies and policymakers should be involved in setting the rules, while requirements for safeguards and monitoring should become mandatory.
“Nobody thinks self-regulation is enough.”
At the same time, Gates is not calling for the development of artificial intelligence to be stopped or sharply slowed down. He believes that additional rules will create some burden for AI companies but should not significantly hinder their work. His main demand is that the development of the technology be accompanied by government oversight, safeguards, and continuous risk monitoring.
A few days before the interview, Gates spoke at his foundation’s Goalkeepers event, where he said that society has so far failed to embed sufficient human values and mechanisms into AI systems to help control their behavior. At the same time, he continues to emphasize not only the risks but also the potential benefits of the technology.
In his essay on the future of artificial intelligence published in August, Gates wrote that AI could become either the greatest tool for reducing inequality or one of the most serious sources of new inequality. He urged world leaders to make it a top priority to create conditions in which the benefits of the technology are available not only to the wealthiest countries and companies.
This position does not mean abandoning the active development of AI. The Gates Foundation recently announced that it will invest at least $1 billion in AI projects over the next two years. Around 40% of the funding is expected to go toward education, another 40% toward healthcare, 10% toward agriculture, and the remaining 10% toward digital infrastructure and datasets for languages that are currently underrepresented in AI models.
Gates’ comments come amid a broader debate over how strictly the development of the most powerful AI systems should be controlled. U.S. President Donald Trump has previously opposed efforts to slow down the American AI industry, linking the issue to competition between the United States and China.
At the same time, some AI company executives are increasingly speaking publicly about potential risks. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently warned about a scenario in which uncontrolled groups of autonomous AI agents could create serious problems for internet infrastructure in the future. Such statements remain forecasts of possible risks rather than descriptions of events that are already taking place.
