Bill Gates says AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths

Bill Gates, the American billionaire who co-founded Microsoft, has said artificial intelligence is powerful enough to cause the deaths of a billion people, and called for federal legislation to govern it.

"AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths," Gates said in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press, an excerpt of which was released on Friday ahead of the full broadcast this weekend.

He also said: "There's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools." Gates said self-regulation by AI companies is not sufficient and that federal law is needed.

The claim is about capability, not prediction. Gates is describing what the technology could enable in the hands of people who mean harm, not forecasting that it will happen. That distinction is the basis of his argument for legislation rather than alarm.

It is also an escalation from his own recent position. In August he warned that world leaders were unprepared for AI's risks. This is considerably further.

Gates joins a lengthening list. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei called on 12 September for the industry to slow the pace of capability development, and was backed within hours by Sam Altman of OpenAI, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis. Microsoft joined the calls for caution two days later.

That position is now contested on two fronts. Four subscribers are suing Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Musk's SpaceXAI, alleging the companies illegally agreed among themselves to slow their products down, claims all four deny and which remain untested. And Nvidia's Jensen Huang has put the chance of AI ending the world by 2030 at zero, calling the warnings "doomsday narratives."

Gates has continued investing throughout. His foundation committed at least $1 billion this month to AI tools for health workers, farmers and teachers in the world's poorest countries.