Bill Gates calls for AI safeguards, including legislation
The Microsoft co-founder said self-regulation is not enough and urged Congress to pass legislation.
Washington, Sept 27 (Reuters) — Bill Gates said AI needs safeguards that go beyond self-regulation, and called for Congress to pass legislation. In a taped interview on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, the Microsoft co-founder said law enforcement and politicians should be involved in discussions on what safeguards and monitoring should look like, adding that this has to be a required step. Gates said there has been a sudden groundswell 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.
He said government must be involved and that no one thinks self-regulation is enough. The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google's DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have also called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems. US President Donald Trump and other opponents of additional AI regulation say new government restrictions would give China the upper hand in the AI revolution. " Gates said safeguards would not significantly slow the industry, and warned the risks of failing to adopt them are real.
” Warnings about AI risks are not new, but the issue took on added urgency this month after researchers at leading AI labs attached both a timeline and a probability to the concern. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said 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, backed Coxon’s warning and said there was a more than 10% chance of such an event within the next decade. Some policymakers have proposed a “kill switch” that would let federal authorities halt AI models.
Gates said he was not opposed to some form of kill switch, but said it would not be enough without other safeguards. The US and China agreed to launch a dialogue on AI following President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to Washington.