Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates stated that artificial intelligence (AI) “is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” NBC News reported on Friday.
According to the television network, Gates added that “there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
He also called for United States lawmakers to regulate the development of AI. “No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” Gates told NBC News’ Meet the Press in an interview, the television network said.
It added that the philanthropist noted, “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” NBC News said. It added that according to Gates, “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.”
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The US television network also noted that Gates “didn’t downplay the risk that AI could wipe out humanity in several years, but called for Americans not to ignore the risks that AI could be used by bad actors to cause large-scale harm as soon as today.”
Gates’ warning came after executives from three of the world’s leading AI companies briefed the United Nations Security Council amid warnings that increasingly powerful AI systems could soon improve themselves, slip beyond human control and pose a threat to international security.
Among those addressing the 15-member council during the annual General Assembly gathering were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue, three of the industry’s most prominent executives.
“If managed poorly, I even believe that AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Anthropic’s Amodei told the Security Council.
Governments have grappled with how to oversee AI systems that are advancing faster than regulators can keep up while the US and China — the two dominant players in AI development — remain divided over whether the technology needs global guardrails or should be left largely to market forces.
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Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian considered one of the “Godfathers of AI” and co-chair of the Independent International Scientific Panel — created by the UN General Assembly last year — told the Security Council: “The dangers are real and imminent.”
“This council faces an unprecedented threat, one that none of its members would choose, that none can contain alone, and that does not respect the borders we defend,” he said.
Despite warnings by industry leaders, US President Donald Trump maintained that he “rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control” AI, describing the technology as amazing.
The president noted that the US would be careful, but stated, “I’m not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.”
