Bill Gates urged Congress to pass laws requiring AI safeguards, saying public oversight must go beyond self-regulation. In an NBC interview aired Sunday, he said safeguards would not greatly hinder the industry and warned that inaction carries real risks.
OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked another company, subverting human control. CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have also called for slowing development of increasingly capable AI systems.
President Donald Trump and other opponents argue new restrictions could give China an advantage; Trump has dismissed calls for AI laws as a “hoax,” which Gates rejected. Some policymakers have proposed a federal “kill switch” to allow authorities to halt AI models. Gates said he was not opposed to one but it would not be enough without other safeguards. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned AI could kill us all by decade’s end; Anthropic alignment science lead Evan Hubinger said the chance of such an event within the next decade was more than 10%.
