Bill Gates joins call for AI safeguards, wants to discuss concerns with Trump
AI requires safeguards that go beyond self-regulation, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview that aired on Sunday, calling for legislation to be passed in Congress. A groundswell has risen in favour of federal intervention after OpenAI said in July an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company
'No one thinks self-regulation is enough,' the Microsoft co-founder told NBC
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AI requires safeguards that go beyond self-regulation, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview that aired on Sunday, calling for legislation to be passed in Congress.
"You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," Gates said in a taped interview on NBC's Meet the Press program. "And that has to be a required thing."
A sudden groundswell has risen in favour of federal intervention after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. Gates joined that chorus, saying government must be involved.
"No one thinks self-regulation is enough," he said.
In a rare show of unity, the CEOs of rivals Anthropic, OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.
WATCH | Bill Gates calls for AI regulation:
Bill Gates warns unchecked AI could ‘cause a billion deaths’
44 minutes ago|
Duration
8:43
Bill Gates is calling for government regulation of artificial intelligence, warning that the technology in the wrong hands could be powerful enough to 'cause a billion deaths.' Oxford University's Robert Trager discusses the risks of increasingly powerful AI systems and whether humanity is prepared to control them.OpenAI said Friday it had paused training of its latest AI models, just hours after the company disclosed it was reviewing several incidents from the summer in which OpenAI agents searching U.S. federal government websites acted in unexpected ways beyond what was asked of them while gathering and distributing information.
Separately, AI evaluator Transluce said agents that appeared to come from OpenAI tried unsuccessfully to hack into a U.S. Department of Education website, a detail that OpenAI has not confirmed.
'It's not a hoax at all'
But U.S. President Donald Trump and other opponents of additional regulation for AI say new government restrictions would simply give China the upper hand in the AI revolution. Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new laws on AI as a "hoax."
Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.
"It's not a hoax at all," he told NBC.
Gates has said he wants to meet Trump to discuss AI.
"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.
OpenAI pauses training of latest models after AI agents probed U.S. government sites in unexpected ways
AI's 'warning shot': Tech companies, experts raise fears of more rogue swarms after alarming Hugging Face hack
Axios reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will have dinner on Sunday with Trump at the White House. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the Axios report.
Warnings about AI's risks are not new. But they took on added urgency this month after researchers in leading AI labs attached both a timeline and a probability to those concerns.
WATCH | Could AI actually kill humanity?:
We've been warned about AI — but could it actually kill humanity? | About That
September 15|
Duration
13:39
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned over concerns that artificial intelligence could cause human extinction within the next decade — and a slew of warnings have followed. Andrew Chang explains the spectrum of potential dangers posed by the 'intelligence explosion' worrying AI industry employees and experts. (Photo credits: The Canadian Press, Reuters, Adobe Stock and Getty Images)Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, prompting U.S. lawmakers to call for new rules to govern the technology. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, echoed Coxon's warning, saying there was a more than 10 per cent chance of such an event within the next decade.
Some policymakers have proposed mandating a "kill switch" that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models. Gates said that while he was not opposed to some sort of kill switch, it would not be enough if other safeguards were not also implemented.
The U.S. and China agreed to launch a dialogue on AI following President Xi Jinping's recent visit to Washington.
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