Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, urges US legislation

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has joined calls for mandatory safeguards on artificial intelligence, telling NBC’s Meet the Press that legislation in the United States Congress is needed because self-regulation by technology companies is not enough.

In a taped interview broadcast on Sunday, Gates said: “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 added: “No one thinks self-regulation is enough.”

Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry and that the risks of doing nothing were real, dismissing claims that AI regulation is unnecessary: “It’s not a hoax at all.”

The intervention follows a sudden groundswell in favour of federal action after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. The chief executives of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI have all called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.

US President Donald Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new AI laws as a “hoax”, arguing restrictions would hand China the advantage in the AI race.

Sources

• Reuters: Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, including legislation
• ARN News Centre (Reuters wire): Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, including legislation