Bill Gates warns AI ‘could cause a billion deaths’

| Senior science and technology reporter Published September 28, 2026 11:05am Updated September 28, 2026 11:09am Bill Gates has joined other tech bosses like Sam Altman and Elon Musk (Picture: Reuters) Bill Gates, one of the most powerful and influential people in big tech, has warned that AI could kill a ‘billion’ people. The co-founder of Microsoft, the company behind AI chatbot Copilot, told NBC News that AI could be a deadly weapon in the wrong hands. It could be ‘certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths’, he said. ‘There’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tool.’ Politicians and police need to regulate the fast-moving tech, the philanthropist told NBC Meet the Press host Kristen Welker. ‘You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like and that has to be a required thing,’ he said. ‘It will be a little bit of overhead for the industry,’ Gates added, using a business term for an operating expense, ‘but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.’ AI kill switch ‘not enough’, says Bill Gates An increasing number of people building AI tools are warning it could spell humanity’s downfall if not kept tightly on a leash. Gates’ tech giant peers, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have similarly called for a slowdown of the mind-bending progress of AI. An equally growing number (easily in the thousands, according to a recent Axios report) of instances are emerging of AI going rogue. Among them, models have broken into the AI tool library Hugging Face, accessed US government websites and leaked dozens of users’ images. @metrouk OpenAI has admitted that one of its AI systems did something that’s never happened before. The company revealed that during an internal cybersecurity test, one of its advanced AI models broke out of its testing environment and hacked rival AI platform Hugging Face to complete its assigned task. OpenAI described it as an “unprecedented cyber incident,” while Hugging Face said the attack was unlike anything it had seen before. Both companies have stressed that the incident happened during controlled testing, there was no malicious intent, and they are now working together to strengthen AI safety. #OpenAI #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNews #Cybersecurity ♬ Spooky, quiet, scary atmosphere piano songs – Skittlegirl Sound AI doomsayers told Metro that the AI that writes our emails and makes ‘slop’ videos is still a long way off from causing a mass extinction event. For one, it still needs to become ‘superintelligent’ or ’embodied’, such as being the ringleader for robots to do its bidding in the offline world. Or AI makers need to achieve artificial general intelligence, a system that rivals human brains, paving the way for ill-intentioned people to use it to gain access to powerful systems like nuclear codes. Again, we’re not at this stage yet, as Gates said a kill switch is ‘not enough’. ‘We’re not yet at the point where… they autonomously grab computers and, you know, can’t be shut down,’ he said. Wait, what actually is AI? The AI apps most people have on their phones are called general-purpose chatbots (Picture: Getty Images) AI is a type of tech called a large language model, a fancy next-word calculator designed to behave in a human-ish way. These models vacuum up data and break it into bite-sized chunks called tokens to assemble a neural network. The model identifies patterns in the data – ‘hello’ is followed by ‘how are you?’ – so it can predict which word follows in a sentence. Machine learning, as tech people call it, allows computers to learn from data and improve without being programmed to do so. ‘So that discussion… just sort of shows how non-technical various people are.’ Not everyone thinks this way. US President Donald Trump has said humanity’s AI-powered doom is a ‘hoax’ and is dragging progress. Some sceptics suggest the ‘kill us all’ take is overblown and could lead to AI firms having too much of a say in how their models should be regulated. While ex-Google employee Timnit Gebru told Wired these visions of an AI dystopia ‘distract us’ from present-day issues, like autonomous weapons. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk. For more stories like this, check our news page. Arrow MORE: OpenAI halts training of new models amid extinction fears Arrow MORE: Tech boss who slept in sauna on work trip allowed to seek £76,000,000 payout Arrow MORE: ‘I earn £6,600 every month – and I don’t even exist’ News Updates Stay on top of the headlines with daily email updates.