Bill Gates Warns AI Could 'Cause A Billion Deaths' Without Regulation

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that artificial intelligence (AI) is powerful enough to 'drive events that cause a billion deaths'.In an interview with NBC News, the billionaire did not downplay the risks associated with the technology and called for stakeholders to not ignore the risks that AI could be used by bad actors to cause large-scale harm.

"AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths. You know, so even though it's pretty hard to get to 100%, there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools," he said.

Gates also talked about industry needing government regulation to stop AI from being too powerful.

"You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," said Gates. "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' warning comes days after UK-based Alan Turing Institute stated that there was a 'realistic possibility' that humans might lose control of 'superintelligent' artificial intelligence (AI) machines within five years. Titled "Frontier AI poses credible near-term risks -- demanding practical research, robust regulation, whole-system verification and international cooperation," the report published on Wednesday (Sep 23) warned about AI exceeding human capabilities, leading to catastrophic risks.

"There is a realistic possibility that 'superintelligent' AI systems will emerge in the next five years, which exceed human abilities across almost all important cognitive tasks," the report highlighted.

The report warned that if AI systems can devise strategies that institutions cannot adequately evaluate, then substantive human control could disappear.

The report also talked about AI posing chemical and biological threats, in addition to undermining the integrity of both our information environment and wider democratic system.

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Warnings About AI

Previously, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed not only hitting the pause button on frontier AI development but also embedding third-party evaluators, common safety benchmarks and international agreements with China to keep the technology in check.

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, echoed Coxon's warning, saying there was more than 10 per cent chance of such an event within the next decade.