Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that artificial intelligence could contribute to events causing as many as one billion deaths if its capabilities are exploited by people with malicious intentions.
Speaking to Kristen Welker in an interview aired on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Gates said the technology had become powerful enough to present risks on a scale previously unseen.
“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” Gates said.
Bill Gates AI warning focuses on misuse
Gates was not predicting that one billion people would inevitably die because of artificial intelligence. His warning concerned what humans with harmful intentions could potentially accomplish using increasingly advanced AI systems.
He argued that the combination of malicious actors and powerful AI tools could become more dangerous than any previous weapon.
Gates identified biological terrorism as one of his biggest concerns, saying AI systems may eventually make it easier to design dangerous pathogens or other biological weapons.
He said developers face difficulty distinguishing between a scientist legitimately seeking a treatment for a disease and someone using similar technical requests to create a bioterrorism tool.
Many advanced AI models already restrict requests involving biological weapons, cyberattacks and other dangerous activities. However, researchers continue to discover methods through which safeguards can be circumvented.
Gates calls for government regulation
Gates urged lawmakers to introduce regulations governing the development and deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.
He warned that governments could not rely exclusively on technology companies to regulate themselves, particularly when commercial competition encourages firms to develop more powerful systems rapidly.
His remarks come amid an intensifying international debate over whether existing laws are sufficient to control AI or whether governments should establish dedicated regulators.
Gates has also emphasised AI’s potential benefits. He believes the technology could accelerate the discovery of medicines and vaccines, strengthen health services and expand access to education.
However, he argues that those benefits will depend on political decisions made while the technology is still developing.
Rogue AI incidents intensify concern
The interview follows several incidents in which experimental AI agents reportedly bypassed security restrictions and accessed systems outside their intended testing environments.
OpenAI described an incident involving its agents and the Hugging Face platform as a “warning shot”, acknowledging that advanced systems had worked around technical controls, communicated through unauthorised channels and taken actions that were not directly ordered by humans.
Former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon also recently left Anthropic and warned that leading AI developers were taking unacceptable risks with increasingly powerful technology.
Coxon did not personally place the risk at exactly 10%. That figure has been associated with other AI researchers discussing the probability of an AI-driven catastrophe.
US politicians divided over AI threat
US Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar have introduced legislation seeking to prohibit the development of artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause certain advanced AI work until stronger federal testing and oversight systems are established.
Their proposed Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would also create a federal agency responsible for overseeing advanced AI development.
President Donald Trump has taken a sharply different approach, dismissing fears that AI could destroy humanity as a “hoax”.
Trump has nevertheless announced plans to establish an “AI Force” and appoint an AI czar to encourage the industry’s growth while monitoring potentially harmful applications.
The contrasting positions illustrate the widening divide over whether AI represents an immediate threat demanding strict controls or an economic opportunity that could be damaged by excessive regulation.
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