In an excerpt from an interview set to air this weekend, Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates said, "AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths." He added, "There's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools."
Warnings out of Silicon Valley have intensified as AI systems advance quickly. Earlier this month, Jacob Coxon left his role at Anthropic PBC as a non-managerial employee and accused both Anthropic and OpenAI of "gambling with our lives" by "racing toward super-intelligent AI." Another Anthropic employee said he believes the odds are greater than 10% that AI eliminates all humans within the next decade. The debate, long simmering within the field, has moved squarely into the public eye, prompting calls to harden safeguards around these systems.
Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei has urged easing the pace of AI development, a proposal that peers quickly supported, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk. The unusual show of alignment underscores rising concern about what ever-more-capable models might enable.
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Gates said companies cannot police themselves. "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." In an August essay, he argued that bad actors could weaponize increasingly powerful AI for cyberattacks, fraud and disinformation, and to inflict large-scale harm on government systems, power grids, hospitals and financial institutions. For your wallet, that risk map points to the same place: more attention on regulation, resilience and the real-world plumbing the economy runs on.
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