Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has some thoughts on AI safeguards, and he’d like to convey them to President Donald Trump himself.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday morning, per Reuters. “And that has to be a required thing.”
“No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” Gates said, adding, “It’s not a hoax at all.”
Over the last few years, Gates has transitioned from being an AI booster to emphasizing its capacity for harm. He published an essay in August 2026 warning that quick action is necessary to prevent the “most turbulent times in human history” from spiraling out of control. His successor at Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella, spearheaded a partnership with OpenAI as one of the company’s top priorities, and recently said on a podcast that AI firms should mitigate their own risks. (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced a pause on advanced development this weekend after its models were implicated in numerous security incidents.)
Gates warned in the interview that “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” though he stopped short of the fantastical claims of Terminator-esque rebellion promoted by many prominent AI executives.
Instead, he characterized AI as empowering malicious actors: “Even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100%, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”
Even as evidence accrues that current-day AI models and their operators can cause severe harm, like cyberattacks or egging on people facing mental health crises, it has yet to be demonstrated that worst-case scenarios like AI-generated plagues are plausible. OpenAI Frontier Risk Council member and SentinelOne cybersecurity researcher Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade recently told ABC exaggerated AI apocalypse scenarios are “enticing to a certain childish style of thinking” that is prevalent among frontier AI lab staff. (In other words, self-flattery.)
Gates has mostly otherwise been in the news lately due to his former habit of meeting and/or hanging out with late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (dozens of times). In 2022, Gates’s ex-spouse Melinda French Gates first publicly identified his proximity to Epstein as a major factor in the couple’s 2021 divorce. Earlier this year, French Gates appeared on an NPR podcast where she said Gates’ ties to the predator filled her with “unbelievable sadness.” 96-year-old fellow billionaire Warren Buffett had reportedly gone full no-contact with Gates, a close friend since 1991, as of this spring.
Gates concluded in the NBC interview on Sunday that he would like to personally meet another former friend of Epstein’s, Trump, and try to convince him to pivot on AI regulation.
Why would he be a good envoy to Trump? In his words: “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 [Trump’s] hearing from other people.”
Incidentally, Gates met with Trump in August 2025 to try to talk him out of continuing to eviscerate U.S. government funding of critical health programs around the world. Later that year, he told Politico, “In my dialogue with President Trump, he clearly cares about these issues and wants to find a generous level for the spending so that the U.S. won’t be responsible for these big increases.”
It did not work. The Trump administration has continued to seek and implement massive cuts to foreign aid as well as attempt to divert billions of dollars in global health programs to other priorities like closing out USAID contracts during this year’s government shutdown. In August, the Washington Post reported that the administration had secretly negotiated to continue slashing tens of billions of dollars in health funds through 2030, including money already appropriated by Congress.
Clearly, at least one lesson is remaining unlearned here.
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