Bill Gates says AI without regulation is ‘completely irresponsible’

The billionaire cofounder of Microsoft says without restrictions, AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’.

Bill Gates at an Australian Open tennis match, January 31, 2026 [Tingshu Wang/Reuters]

Not requiring AI to have safeguards and be subject to outside monitoring is “completely irresponsible” and could lead to global harm to humanity, said tech mogul Bill Gates , in a series of media appearances where the philanthropist weighed in on global discussions concerning how to regulate the technology.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion of what safeguards and monitoring looks like,” Gates said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, parts of which aired on Sunday.

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Gates warned that the technology was “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.” Ensuring that did not happen, he said, could be a more difficult task than other existential threats, such as slowing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

The tech pioneer turned philanthropist said he was willing to speak with US President Donald Trump to convey his concerns directly and disagreed with his characterisation of recent warnings over the danger AI posed as a “hoax”.

“I hope that, given ⁠⁠my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said in the interview.

In recent weeks, the heads of leading AI companies have said publicly that their industry needs frameworks and guardrails to ensure the technology does not outpace human oversight, spin out of control and prove to be catastrophic for the world.

“If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole,” Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, told members of the United Nations Security Council last week.

But Trump and senior officials in his administration have baulked at imposing regulations on the multi-trillion-dollar industry, which they say is part of a race between the US and China.

On Saturday, the day after meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to discuss AI, Trump repeated his scepticism of the warnings and said he would not regulate the industry. He compared the apocalyptic warnings to other issues he is dismissive of, such as climate change and Russian interference in US elections. “It’s just like, everybody’s going to be dead, you’re all supposed to be dead now because of global warming. It’s like Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. All of these different hoaxes,” Trump said.

Gates told CNN that the kind of safeguards needed for AI development would not harm the industry.

“The amount of slowing down is not going to be that dramatic,” he said. “To have a monitoring or policing layer that says, is this being used for a cyberattack, is this being used for bio-terrorism, that can be done.”

The 70-year-old co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 and ran it during an era of widespread consumer adoption of personal computers and later the internet. He became the richest person in the world in 1995, and retained that spot throughout much of the next two decades, before giving much of his wealth away for philanthropic causes and being replaced by a new generation of tech moguls, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.

Earlier this month, his philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, said it was committing $1bn to expand AI access in the developing world.

微软亿万富翁联合创始人表示，如果不加以限制，人工智能可能会“造成十亿人死亡”。

比尔·盖茨在澳大利亚网球公开赛现场观看比赛，2026年1月31日 [王婷舒/路透社]

科技巨头比尔·盖茨在一系列媒体露面中表示，不要求人工智能具备安全保障措施并接受外部监督是“完全不负责任的”，可能会对人类造成全球性危害。这位慈善家在露面中就如何监管这项技术的全球讨论发表了看法。

“我们需要执法部门和政界人士参与讨论保障措施和监督措施的具体内容，”盖茨在接受 NBC 的《与媒体见面》节目采访时表示，该节目的部分内容已于周日播出。

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盖茨警告说，这项技术“威力足以引发导致十亿人死亡的事件”。他表示，确保这种情况不会发生，可能比其他关乎生存的威胁（例如减缓核武器扩散）更难。

这位科技先驱出身的慈善家表示，他愿意与美国总统唐纳德·特朗普直接对话，表达自己的担忧，并且不同意特朗普将近期有关人工智能构成危险的警告描述为“骗局”。

“鉴于我毕生在这个领域的工作，我希望我所说的这件事有多么独特和不同，以及我有多么担忧，能够补充他从其他人那里听到的信息，”盖茨在采访中说道。

最近几周，领先的人工智能公司负责人公开表示，他们的行业需要框架和护栏，以确保这项技术不会超越人类的监管，失控并给世界带来灾难性后果。

“如果管理不善，我甚至认为人工智能可能会对整个人类构成威胁，”克劳德背后的公司 Anthropic 的首席执行官达里奥·阿莫迪上周告诉联合国安理会成员。

但特朗普及其政府的高级官员一直不愿对这个价值数万亿美元的行业施加监管，他们认为这是美中竞争的一部分。

周六，在与中国领导人习近平会晤讨论人工智能的第二天，特朗普重申了他对相关警告的怀疑，并表示他不会对该行业进行监管。他将这些末日般的警告与他一直不屑一顾的其他问题相提并论，例如气候变化和俄罗斯干预美国大选。“这就好比，所有人都要死了，你们现在都应该因为全球变暖而死了。这就像俄罗斯、俄罗斯、俄罗斯的骗局。各种各样的骗局，”特朗普说道。

盖茨告诉 CNN，人工智能发展所需的这类保障措施不会损害该行业。

他说：“网络速度放缓的幅度不会太大。要建立一套监控或监管机制，来判断网络攻击或生物恐怖主义活动是否利用了这些手段，这是可以实现的。”

这位70岁的老人于1975年联合创办了软件公司微软，并在个人电脑和后来的互联网被消费者广泛接受的时代领导该公司。他于1995年成为世界首富，并在接下来的二十年里大部分时间里保持着这一地位，之后他将大部分财富捐赠给了慈善事业，并被包括埃隆·马斯克、杰夫·贝佐斯和马克·扎克伯格在内的新一代科技巨头所取代。

本月初，他的慈善机构盖茨基金会表示，将投入 10 亿美元，用于扩大发展中国家人工智能的普及。