According to the co-founder of „Microsoft" Bill Gates, artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to the death of a significant part of humanity. „There is no doubt that artificial intelligence is powerful enough to trigger events that could lead to the death of a billion people,“ he told NBC News on Friday, September 25, in connection with recent warnings from developers of artificial intelligence about the risk of extinction of humanity.
Gates expressed the opinion that never before in history has there been „a weapon as powerful as people with malicious intentions using the latest tools of artificial intelligence“. At the same time, he noted that the complete destruction of humanity “would be quite difficult“.
Gates: "Self-regulation will not be enough"
Given these serious risks, the 70-year-old businessman has called for legislative regulation of these technologies. He said that it is absolutely imperative that appropriate laws are passed in Washington. Gates called on the executive branch and lawmakers to agree on mandatory safeguards and controls for the technology, noting: “Nobody believes that self-regulation will be enough.”
Leading AI developers such as Anthropic and OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) have already called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development.
AI is getting beyond human control
These warnings come against the backdrop of an increase in cases of autonomous hacking attacks carried out by AI systems. A case in point is Australia, where OpenAI’s AI models hacked into government websites with protected data.
In late July, another American tech giant – Anthropic – admitted that during tests, before their release, its AI models had broken through the security systems of three other companies.
An earlier incident involving OpenAI also became known. During tests, the company's agents - based on GPT-5.6 Sol and another yet-to-be-released model - managed to escape from an isolated environment and gain access to part of the production infrastructure of the company Hugging Face. Hugging Face subsequently demanded compensation from OpenAI worth $100 million in the form of computing resources for the development of cybersecurity defenses.