Washington: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has warned that artificial intelligence could drive events causing one billion deaths, as a sharp debate emerged in Washington over whether governments should regulate advanced AI or avoid rules that could slow the United States in its race with China.
Gates told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that AI was unlike earlier technological advances and could become vastly more intelligent than humans over the next several years.
“This is truly an evolutionary event,” Gates said. “We have created an intelligent species that, in many respects, is already smarter than we are, and over the next several years at kind of exponentially improving level will be insanely smarter than we are.”
Asked whether AI could end humanity, Gates said: “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.”
“There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools,” he added.
Gates said governments lacked sufficient expertise to understand dangerous thresholds involving biological attacks, cyberattacks and other potential uses of the technology. He rejected reliance on voluntary safeguards by companies.
“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” Gates said.
He called for legislation requiring safeguards and monitoring systems. Such requirements would impose some costs on the industry but would not dramatically slow its development, he said.
“It’s completely irresponsible not to require every AI to have these safeguards and monitoring capabilities,” Gates said.
His warning came as Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat whose district includes part of Silicon Valley, called for a verifiable US-China agreement prohibiting AI systems capable of independently improving themselves.
Khanna said legislation backed by Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar would ban recursive self-improving AI until safeguards were established.
“That is basically AI that isn’t being trained anymore by human beings. It’s AI that can train itself. And that is a real risk of losing human control,” Khanna told NBC.
Khanna said the United States and China should create a working group of technologists and negotiate common restrictions.
“Banning self-recursive self-improving AI should not be controversial,” he said. “And I do believe the United States can lead on a treaty that is both enforceable and verifiable where we ban recursive self-improving AI, and we have some monitoring of these frontier labs.”
US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz said Washington and Beijing had agreed to establish a superintelligence dialogue following President Donald Trump’s summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Waltz told CNN the talks would bring experts together to discuss guardrails covering areas such as biological weapons research and nuclear systems.
“With the United States and China so much further ahead than the rest of the world when it comes to these frontier models, I think the world should see that as a positive thing,” Waltz said.
Attorney General Todd Blanche, however, cautioned against regulations that could weaken US competitiveness. He told ABC that existing criminal and civil laws already allowed authorities to act against individuals and companies when crimes were committed using AI.
“The answer isn’t always more laws, more laws, more laws,” Blanche said.
He said companies could curb or adjust their systems when problems emerged. “The answer is not to just try to — all of a sudden try to regulate this in a way that will make us second or third place in the world as far as being the leaders in this space,” he said.
India is rapidly expanding the use of AI in public services, healthcare, agriculture, education and digital commerce. New Delhi has also stressed that AI governance should promote safety, accountability and equitable access without blocking innovation in developing economies.
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