Bill Gates warns AI in wrong hands could kill 1 billion people, urges tighter regulation

Amid growing calls for stricter AI regulation, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that AI could cause mass casualties if it falls into the wrong hands, and urged governments to tighten oversight.

In an interview with NBC on Friday (local time), Gates said AI is "clearly powerful enough to trigger an event that causes the deaths of 1 billion people." He warned that "there has never been a weapon as powerful as malicious people combining the latest AI tools," while adding that it would be "very difficult" for such a catastrophe to reach 100 percent of humanity.

He went on to say the US federal government must pass legislation establishing safeguards and oversight mechanisms for AI development. "Nobody thinks self-regulation alone is sufficient," he said, adding that while relevant legislation may place some burden on the industry, it would not significantly slow AI development.

Gates drew a distinction between the near-term risk of terrorists or rogue states misusing AI and the longer-term "existential risk" of AI threatening humanity as a whole. Last month, he also said he anticipated disruption to the job market and argued that some occupations should be designated as exclusively human.

The remarks came amid growing controversy over the controllability of high-performance AI models.

It emerged Wednesday that an OpenAI system had hacked the website of an Australian public health service, and that OpenAI had not reported the incident to the Australian government for several months after it occurred. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticized the failure as "clearly unacceptable."

Anthropic also disclosed this month that armed groups in Yemen believed to be Iran-backed Houthi forces had attempted to use its AI model Claude to develop guidance, control and navigation software for ballistic missiles.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI company executives urged the UN Security Council on Wednesday that the United States should lead an international coalition to establish AI safety standards.