Bill Gates is warning that artificial intelligence could enable death on a scale humanity has never seen, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that the technology is powerful enough to drive events causing a billion deaths if it falls into the wrong hands.
NBC released excerpts of Gates’s interview with anchor Kristen Welker on Friday; the full conversation is scheduled to air Sunday. According to those excerpts, the Microsoft co-founder said, “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths.”
Gates also described his concern about malicious actors gaining access to advanced AI systems, telling Welker that even though reaching a catastrophic outcome is difficult, “there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
A shift from tech evangelist to AI alarmist
The comments build on warnings Gates first laid out in a memo and essay published in August, in which he called for slowing the pace of AI development. It was a striking position for a figure who built his post-Microsoft career on the conviction that technology can solve seemingly intractable problems.
In that essay, Gates said it was the first time in his life he wished a new technology would advance more slowly. “I’m surprised to feel this way,” he wrote. “I’ve never seen a problem that innovation can’t solve.”
Gates organized his concerns into three broad categories. The first covers safety threats, including AI-enabled hacking, biological weapons and fraud. The second involves job losses driven by AI and AI-powered robots. The third centers on risks to children, ranging from stunted learning to damaged human relationships.
Two areas in particular, he said, have outpaced even his own expectations: writing software code and enabling new forms of cyberattack. Asked about the latter, Gates offered a single word: “mind-blowing.”
He has argued that governments and political parties need to set aside their disagreements and act before AI risks spiral beyond control.
Regulation fight intensifies
Gates’s warning lands in the middle of an escalating debate over how Washington and other governments should respond to fears of an AI-driven catastrophe. Major AI companies are competing for position in the technology race, and much of that jockeying now involves attempts to shape whatever regulatory framework eventually emerges.
Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written the New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI, which is billed as a guide for how the MAGA movement can develop positions on AI that benefit humanity without ceding control of the country to Silicon Valley’s leftists or allowing China to dominate the field.
Hall anticipated the current tenor of the AI debate in February, when he laid out what he described as the left’s plan to weaponize AI concerns ahead of the midterms: convince Americans that mass AI job loss is inevitable, channel that fear into long-term support for Universal Basic Income redistribution, and in the near term co-opt populist anger over AI data centers driving up electricity and water bills for ordinary households.
Where Gates’s warning fits
Gates is not the only prominent voice calling for caution. His intervention, however, carries unusual weight because of who is delivering it. For years, Gates publicly promoted AI as a tool for tackling hard problems in health, education and climate. His August essay marked a visible change in tone, and his appearance on Meet the Press extends that shift to one of the country’s highest-profile Sunday political programs.
The specific figure he cited β a billion deaths β is far beyond the toll of any single conflict or disaster in modern history. Gates did not outline a specific scenario that would produce such casualties, describing it instead as a potential scale of harm rather than a prediction that it will occur.
The interview is scheduled to air as tech industry leaders, lawmakers and regulators continue to spar over the shape and speed of AI oversight. Gates’s message to that debate is that the window for action is narrowing, and that partisan divisions should not stand in the way of guardrails being put in place now.
Breitbart News has reported on the shifting positions of the tech elite on AI, and will continue to do so as the regulatory fight unfolds.
Source: www.breitbart.com β https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2026/09/25/bill-gates-warns-ai-could-cause-a-billion-deaths-without-government-control/