Gates Warns AI Could Cause a Billion Deaths Unchecked
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates warned that artificial intelligence left unregulated is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” calling on Congress and law enforcement to impose mandatory safeguards on the technology. His comments, made in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired in full on Sunday, Sept. 27, come as the Trump administration accelerates AI development to compete with China and resists calls to slow down.
“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” Gates told moderator Kristen Welker, according to NBC News. Asked whether Washington needs to pass legislation, he replied, “Absolutely.”
A Warning Framed as a Weapon
Gates, who chairs the roughly $89 billion Gates Foundation, argued that the combination of malicious actors and advanced AI represents an unprecedented threat.
“There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he said. He framed regulation as a modest cost of doing business rather than a brake on innovation: “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like. And that has to be a required thing. And it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”
Gates also dismissed the idea that a so-called “kill switch” would be sufficient protection. “It’s not enough to have a kill switch,” he said. “We’re not yet at the point where … they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can’t be shut down.”
The interview followed a nearly 6,000-word essay Gates published in late August warning about AI’s large-scale risks, as The Guardian reported. It also placed Gates back in the public eye after his name surfaced in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal; an external review commissioned by his foundation and released in July determined that Gates was among staff and leaders who had collectively held roughly 30 meetings with Epstein between 2011 and 2014. Gates has not been accused of involvement in Epstein’s crimes and has said he regretted “every minute” he spent with him.
An Industry Divided on Oversight
Gates’s call lands in the middle of a widening split among the technology leaders building the most powerful AI systems.
Earlier in September, the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI agreed the race to develop powerful AI “should slow down.” Their statements followed the resignation of Anthropic safety researcher Jacob Coxon, who publicly warned that the companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
The pressure has pushed some chief executives toward international coordination. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for regulation targeting all U.S. frontier AI companies and cooperation with China, writing that “the most effective method of pacing is via regulation.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking before the United Nations, called for international standards for “measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient and preserving meaningful human oversight,” according to NBC News.
Others have rejected that approach. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told NBC News he disagreed, saying, “I don’t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination,” and that each lab should take time internally to proceed safely. Microsoft President Brad Smith, appearing at a United Nations session, criticized rivals for racing one another, comparing the dynamic to two airplane manufacturers competing to ship a model they feared would crash.
“Would you say, ‘I need to win this race’? Or, would you say, ‘I’m going to put the safety of my passengers and the safety of the public ahead of my winning that race’?” Smith asked. “That is the fundamental question.”
Washington Balks as States Move
At the federal level, momentum for legislation has stalled. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) declined to bring House lawmakers back to Washington to pass AI-regulation legislation, saying he would defer to the AI companies and that Congress should not “rush in” and do something “detrimental to national security.”
President Donald Trump has rejected calls to slow AI development, with Deadline reporting that he dismissed regulatory concerns as a “hoax” and insisted the U.S. already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power” over AI companies.
Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed legislation to temporarily pause advanced AI development while guardrails are put in place. With Congress reluctant to act, governors have moved ahead. California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order in the week of Sept. 21 creating a board of experts to strengthen AI-safety laws and weigh an emergency “kill switch” for frontier models. Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul released their own AI-regulation plans the same week.
Reaction and the Road Ahead
The warning drew sharply divergent reactions. Amy Kremer, a Republican National Committee member and chairwoman of Humans First, told Fox News that even Gates now acknowledges the danger, arguing that only those “being paid by Big AI” still deny it. Nancy Tengler, CEO of Laffer Tengler Investments, countered that the U.S. “needs to win the AI race just as we sought to win the arms race during the Cold War.”
Julia Cartwright of the American Institute for Economic Research framed the risk in economic terms, telling Fox News that AI is “sharply lowering the cost of causing harm” and that clear liability rules would let developers “internalize the risks they create” without slowing innovation.
Gates, for his part, rejected the framing of AI purely as a geopolitical contest. “The problem is that the rest of the world is either discounting this or just thinking of this as a competition,” he said. “And it’s very scary that we don’t have all of the thinkers saying, ‘How do we want to shape this?’”
Whether his intervention shifts a stalled federal debate remains an open question. With the White House pressing for speed, a divided industry, and Congress unwilling to act, the near-term battleground appears to be the states — and the question Gates raised of whether safeguards come “now” or only after the risks are realized.