Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, legislation
Reuters, WASHINGTON and CHICAGO
Artificial intelligence (AI) requires safeguards that go beyond self-regulation, Microsoft Corp cofounder Bill Gates said in an interview that aired on Sunday, calling for legislation to be passed in US 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 favor of federal intervention after OpenAI in July said that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. Gates joined that chorus, saying that government must be involved.
Bill Gates attends a dinner with US President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington on Sept. 4 last year.
Photo: AP
“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he said.
In a rare show of unity, the CEOs of rivals Anthropic PBC, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.
However, US 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 said 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.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was expected to have dinner with Trump on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter said. Axios had reported the dinner earlier in the day.
Trump confirmed that he planned to have a dinner meeting with Amodei on Sunday night, but reaffirmed his stance against slowing the pace of AI development.
Although he acknowledged Amodei’s concern that going too fast on AI could expand risks, Trump said it was more important for the US to maintain a technological edge over China.
“We’re about maybe a year and a half up on China,” Trump told Fox News while attending the Presidents Cup golf tournament in Illinois. “We’re leading, and we’re building tremendous, trillions of dollars’ worth of places. And why should we give that up?”
Incidents of rogue AI agents are not a cause for alarm, Trump told Fox News.
“I don’t worry about it,” he said, adding that he remained confident in the technology and its potential.
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