Summarize
Idrees AliSeptember 27, 202611:46 AM EDTUpdated 2 hours ago
WASHINGTON/CHICAGO, Sept 27 (Reuters) – AIrequires 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,” 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. 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 (GOOGL.O)DeepMind, Microsoft (MSFT.O) and xAI have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.
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But US President Donald Trump and other opponents of additional regulation for AI say new government restrictions would simply give Chinathe upper hand in the AI revolution. Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new laws on AI as a “hoax.”
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.
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Gates has said he wants to meet Trump to discuss AI.
“I hope that, given my life’s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he’s hearing from other people,” Gates said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is expected to have dinner with Trump on Sunday, a source familiar with the matter said. Axios had reported the dinner earlier in the day.
Anthropic and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment.
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“President Trump has been clear: America will lead the world in Super Intelligence, while protecting American consumers,” a White House official said.
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 Coxon’s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event within the next decade.
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Some policymakers have proposed mandating a “kill switch” that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models. 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.
Updates sourcing in paragraph 11, adds comment from White House official in paragraph 13
Reporting by Idrees Ali, and Trevor Hunnicutt in Chicago; Additional reporting by Arathy Somasekhar; Editing by Mark Porter
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
National security correspondent focusing on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. Reports on U.S. military activity and operations throughout the world and the impact that they have. Has reported from over two dozen countries to include Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the Middle East, Asia and Europe. From Karachi, Pakistan.
Trevor Hunnicutt is White House Correspondent at Reuters News. He writes about U.S. foreign and domestic policy and regularly travels with the President of the United States. Prior to joining the White House team in 2021, he covered presidential campaigns, economics, finance and investing for many years. He has also served on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. Hunnicutt holds a bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and a master’s from the London School of Economics.
