Bill Gates Warns AI Powerful Enough to Lead to ‘a Billion Deaths’

Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates warned that artificial intelligence is a “powerful enough” tool to kill off a substantial portion of humanity, joining a growing chorus of tech leaders and employees calling attention to AI’s existential risks.

“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” Gates said in an excerpt of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, set to air this weekend. “There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”

Silicon Valley has escalated warnings about the potential for catastrophic harms from AI as the technology rapidly improves. Jacob Coxon, a rank-and-file staffer at Anthropic PBC, quit his job earlier this month and accused both his former employers — Anthropic and OpenAI — of “gambling with our lives” by “racing toward super-intelligent AI.” Another Anthropic employee said he believes there is a greater-than-10% chance that AI eliminates all humans in the next decade.

Those remarks have led to mainstream attention for a long-running — and divisive — conversation within the field, prompting public calls for the industry to do more to safeguard its technology. Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has since urged a slowdown in AI development, a proposal that was quickly supported by peers like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

In the interview, Gates said self-regulation is not enough. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” he said. “And that has to be a required thing.”

Gates previously argued in an August essay that bad actors could use increasingly powerful AI tools for cyberattacks, fraud, disinformation and other forms of large-scale harm against hospitals, financial institutions, power grids and government systems.

Read More: Five Takeaways From Bill Gates’ Essay on AI’s Potential Risks