Bill Gates claims AI could 'cause a billion deaths,' doesn't say how

Bill Gates has claimed that AI is powerful enough to "cause a billion deaths" as there have been some that have called for a slow down on the technology while President Donald Trump has said that the US must go full speed ahead in developing AI.

Gates made the comments in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC's "Meet the Press" that was released on Friday. He was asked if the technology could end humanity.

Earlier this month, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, said that those who are in the AI space need to "pace the frontier" when it comes to AI, saying that the technology poses existential dangers. He cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where agents developed by OpenAI hacked the infrastructure of AI competitor Hugging Face. Others have said that the US needs to go forward with full force in order to beat China in the AI race.

"AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths," the Microsoft co-founder said. "You know, so 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." Gates did not specify what kind of event that AI could cause that would cause the billion deaths. 

In an interview earlier this month, Jacob Coxon, who claimed to be a whistleblower about AI after quitting Anthropic (where Amodei quickly agreed with Coxon), claimed, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Amodei has called for global and federal cooperation over the dangers of the technology. Trump, however, has said that the AI companies should keep building the models. China, likewise, was critical of Amodei's call for a global slowdown, claiming that it was a move out of the "Cold War playbook" to slow down their AI development.

Mark Zuckerberg of Meta has disagreed with the development of global standards. “I don’t think that we need some kind of industrywide coordination,” he told NBC News. “I think that each lab needs to take the time, and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to basically make sure that you’re proceeding safely.”