Bill Gates said AI safety concerns are “not a hoax” and warned that AI development without government safeguards could lead to a billion deaths. In an interview aired Sunday, he said he hopes to meet Trump to seek rules for all U.S. AI systems, not a development slowdown.
Gates said AI was not already out of control, noting it was not running “millions of robots yet” and that computers could be turned off. He nevertheless said government regulation and industry self-regulation were needed, identifying malicious uses such as fraud and attacks on electric infrastructure as the most dangerous threat right now.
Gates said an international agreement on AI rules would be harder to reach than Cold War nuclear-weapons negotiations. He argued the U.S. should lead on safeguards; the article says Trump had called regulation concerns a “hoax,” while several frontier-AI lab leaders—including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei and Elon Musk—had backed government regulation.
