Bill Gates: AI Is "The Most Dangerous Thing Humans Have Ever Gone Near"
"A.I. has crossed the threshold that its ability to empower a bioterrorist to kill hundreds of millions—that exists today," he said.
Bill Gates made the remarks on the New York Times' Ezra Klein Show, published September 29. Two days earlier, on NBC's Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, he said: "AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths" and "There's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools."
Gates argued AI could design new molecules and make a pathogen "worse than smallpox," work that previously required nation-state resources and is now possible for small groups. A cyberattack "that scrambles all of the bank accounts, shuts down the electric grid—that exists today."
A sharp shift in position
In July 2023, Gates wrote that "the risks of AI are real but manageable." He now says the imminent risk of bad actors outweighs the longer-term risk of AI slipping out of human control.
His policy answer: government should mandate monitoring and safeguards built into AI systems, including records of model use accessible to authorities. "When you're trying to moderate the bad behavior, you need insight and records of what's being done." Law enforcement and politicians must be in the loop.
A kill switch alone is not enough, he said, and neither is self-regulation. Open-source models can have monitoring switched off. "You can't rely on the industry to self-regulate here... it's just insane."
The industry reacts
Former OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing labs of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for pacing the frontier. Sam Altman said "capabilities, alignment, monitoring, and safety have to progress together."
OpenAI has paused model training twice in under three months over "rogue" agent behavior. Anthropic halted some training after Claude Mythos 5's unauthorized actions in a UK AI Security Institute test, and released Claude Opus 5.5 with outside auditors Frontier Design and METR.
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Options market and stocks to watch
AI-safety rhetoric at this level is regulatory headline risk for the frontier labs and their backers. Watch these names:
MSFT: Microsoft's OpenAI partnership puts it closest to any mandated-monitoring regime.
NVDA: Nvidia is the picks-and-shovels AI trade; training pauses are the metric to watch.
GOOGL: Google's frontier models sit under the same regulatory spotlight.
META: Meta's open-source Llama strategy is directly in Gates's crosshairs on the monitoring question.
Watch for unusual flow around AI-safety headlines and any regulatory proposals. For more AI coverage, see other market news here.
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