Billionaire Microsoft co-founder says that without restrictions, AI could “cause a billion deaths.”
Published on September 27, 2026
Failing to require AI to have safeguards and be subject to outside oversight is “completely irresponsible” and could lead to global harm to humanity, tech mogul Bill Gates said, during a series of media appearances in which the philanthropist weighed in on global discussions about how to regulate technology.
“It takes law enforcement and politicians to be part of the conversation about what safeguards and oversight look like,” Gates said in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press, portions of which aired Sunday.
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Gates warned that the technology was “certainly powerful enough to cause events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” Ensuring that doesn’t 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 raise his concerns directly and disagreed with his characterization of recent warnings about the danger of AI as a “hoax”.
“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, me saying how unique and different it is and how concerned I am will add to what he hears from other people,” Gates said in the interview.
In recent weeks, executives from the largest AI companies have said publicly that their industry needs frameworks and guardrails to ensure the technology does not overtake human oversight, spiral out of control, and prove catastrophic for the world.
“If mismanaged, I even think AI could pose a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, told members of the United Nations Security Council last week.
But Trump and top officials in his administration have been reluctant to impose regulations on the multibillion-dollar industry, which they say is part of a race between the United States and China.
On Saturday, a day after meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss AI, Trump reiterated his skepticism about the warnings and said he would not regulate the industry. He compared doomsday warnings to other issues he rejects, such as climate change and Russian interference in US elections. “It’s like everyone’s going to die, you’re all supposed to be dead now because of global warming. It’s like Russia, Russia, the Russia hoax. All these different hoaxes,” Trump said.
Gates told CNN that the kind of safeguards needed for AI development would not harm the industry.
“The magnitude of the slowdown will not be that dramatic,” he said. “Having a level of surveillance or policing that says: is this used for a cyberattack, is this used for bioterrorism, it’s possible. »
The 70-year-old co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 and led it at a time when consumers were widely adopting personal computers and then the Internet. He became the world’s richest person in 1995 and held that spot for much of the next two decades, before donating much of his wealth to philanthropic causes and being replaced by a new generation of tech moguls, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
Earlier this month, his philanthropic foundation, the Gates Foundation, announced it would dedicate $1 billion to expanding access to AI in developing countries.
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