WASHINGTON — 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,” Mr. 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 said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. Mr. Gates joined that chorus, saying that 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.
But 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. Mr. Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new laws on AI as a “hoax.”
Mr. 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.
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.
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to call for new rules to govern the technology. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, echoed Mr. Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% 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. Mr. 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 US and China agreed to launch a dialogue on AI following President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Washington. — Reuters
