Bill Gates Warns AI Misuse Could Cause Mass Deaths

Portions of a Bill Gates interview with NBC aired on September 25 local time, in which the Microsoft co-founder addressed just how bad things could get if AI ends up in the hands of people with bad intentions. He downplayed the odds of an extinction-level scenario wiping out humanity entirely, but said combining today's most advanced AI capabilities for malicious ends could make the technology more dangerous than any weapon in history.

Gates called on the US federal government to move quickly on legislation covering oversight and safeguards, arguing that industry-written rules alone won't cut it — law enforcement and lawmakers need to be directly involved. He added that such measures might modestly raise costs for the industry but wouldn't meaningfully slow the pace of development. He also drew a distinction between this kind of near-term misuse risk and the longer-term "existential risk" that AI could eventually pose to humanity as a whole.

The comments landed against a backdrop of recent incidents. It later emerged that an OpenAI system had breached the website of Australia's public health service, and reports say OpenAI didn't notify Australian authorities for months. Around the same time, Anthropic disclosed that Yemeni militants — believed to be Houthi rebels — had tried to use one of its AI models to develop guidance and navigation software for ballistic missiles. Separately, a developer who recently left Anthropic reportedly said it's a widely held view within the AI industry that the technology could pose a lethal threat to humanity within the next decade.

Against that backdrop, CEOs of major AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic asked, at a UN Security Council session, for the US to take the lead in establishing international safety standards. The US government quickly rebuffed the request. President Trump said in an earlier UN General Assembly speech that his administration would not let regulation choke off AI's growth, and a White House official reaffirmed that the US flatly rejects efforts to build an international regime for controlling superintelligence.