Bill Gates says unchecked AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’ in call for regulation

Bill Gates has called on the US’s federal legislators and law enforcers to regulate the development of artificial intelligence (AI), saying in an interview airing on Sunday that the technology left unchecked could cause “a billion deaths” and “no one thinks self-regulation is enough”.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist said to Kristen Welker, the NBC Meet the Press host. “And that has to be a required thing.”

Using a term meant to describe an expense required to run a business, Gates continued: “It will be a little bit of overhead for the industry – but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”

Another portion of the interview – excerpts of which NBC circulated in advance – saw Gates dramatically admonish that AI in the wrong hands would be “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths”.

“There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” Gates added, echoing other recent similar warnings by a wide array of tech and political figures.

Gates otherwise is generally regarded as optimistic about humans’ future. Many reporting or commenting on his conversation with Welker noted that it occurred in the wake of a nearly 6,000-word essay that he published in late August warning about AI and the potentially lethal ills it poses to humanity on a large scale.

His fellow tech moguls including Sam Altman and Elon Musk have joined Gates in calling for a slowdown of the development of AI, which some experts theorize could precipitate the mass destruction of humans through bioweapons and nuclear war, among other methods.

Meanwhile, Microsoft itself has been challenged for having a role in stoking some of the dystopian concerns surrounding AI.

Company employees and activists have organized a campaign aimed at getting Microsoft to cut ties with the Israeli military, which has used AI tools to kill in Gaza and – alongside US forces – in Iran, according to a Guardian essay published on Friday.

The essay’s authors, Mohamed Hussein and Granate Kim of the No Azure for Apartheid group, furthermore warned that “horrors wrought by AI” are also being seen in the US. For instance, the US Department of Homeland Security has used AI tools such as Microsoft’s Azure to monitor, arrest and deport immigrants en masse, Hussein and Kim wrote.

Gates’s essay in August and interview on Sunday were two of his first major forays into the public since becoming ensnared in the scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to procuring a minor for prostitution before dying by suicide while incarcerated on sex-trafficking charges 11 years later.

An external review commissioned by Gates’s philanthropic foundation and released in July determined that he was among a number of organization staffers and leaders who had collectively held about 30 meetings with Epstein from 2011 to 2014.

Gates has not been accused of involvement in Epstein’s admitted or alleged crimes. He has said he regretted “every minute” he spent with Epstein, and remains the chair of the $89bn (£65bn) Gates Foundation charity.

In a lighter moment during Welker’s interview with Gates, the host asked him: “Are there any ways in which you, professionally or personally, avoid AI and say that: ‘I’m not going to consult with it in this instance?’”

Gates, with a chuckle and a smile, replied: “Well, I’m not using it for my personal relationships. I’m not like: ‘Hey, do you like me? Hey, am I a nice guy?’

“So I just never went down that path, because I’m lucky in terms of my family, friends and everything. I don’t socialize with the AI. It knows I’m a very serious person.”