Bill Gates: AI is 'powerful enough' to drive events causing 'a billion deaths', and 'no one thinks self-regulation is enough'

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has told NBC News' Meet the Press that AI "is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths", and that "No one thinks self-regulation is enough". NBC News published excerpts between 24 and 26 September 2026 from an interview it says took place on Wednesday (23 September) and aired on Sunday (27 September). NBC has since published the full interview online. Updated 27 September 2026 with lines from the full interview; see the note below.

What Gates said

NBC News quotes the longer version:

"AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths. 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."

On our reading, this is a statement about what the technology could be used to do in the wrong hands, not a forecast that it will happen. The weapon Gates describes is "the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools", not AI acting on its own. NBC reports that he asked Americans not to ignore the risk that AI "could be used by bad actors to cause large-scale harm as soon as today", and says he "didn't downplay" the risk that AI could wipe out humanity "in several years". In the full interview, according to NBC's captions, Gates also said: "There is not a current risk of these AIs getting completely out of control," adding that "the thing that's urgent has to do with bad people using AI, not the AI going off on its own." Later in the interview he called stopping AI "by itself from getting out of control" "the longer term warning", and "very important to work on". Earlier, he said that putting in safeguards and monitoring is a choice, and "the only question is do we do that before or after there's some large scale" cyber attacks or bioattacks.

Bloomberg and Newsweek quote the same two sentences but leave out the middle clause, "so even though it's pretty hard to get to 100%". We have used NBC's fuller version. NBC's video of the exchange shows, in the captions NBC publishes with it, that the remark was Gates's answer when Welker asked whether he believes AI is powerful enough to end all of humanity. On our reading, the "100%" clause refers to that question.

Regulation, and how much it would cost the industry

Asked by moderator Kristen Welker whether Washington needs to pass legislation, Gates said, "Absolutely." NBC then quotes him:

"You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like," he said. "And that has to be a required thing. And it will be a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they're doing."

Gates's own view, then, is that required safeguards and monitoring would bring "a little bit of overhead" and "not a dramatic slowing". The excerpts released before broadcast did not include anything he said about AI's benefits. In the full interview he did: according to the captions NBC publishes with the video, he said there is "no such thing as being too focused on" accelerating "the good potential" while minimising what he called "truly horrific" bad things, and that his foundation's money "will be far, far better spent because we're using AI".

Congress

NBC reports that House Speaker Mike Johnson, on the programme's 13 September edition (transcript), said: "We have to put some guardrails, some safety measures in place to ensure that AI doesn't run away." NBC also quotes him as saying: "So we can't rush in and have Congress do something that would be detrimental to national security."

Not a new position

Gates has written about these risks before. In a Gates Notes essay published on 26 August 2026, he wrote about AI and bioterrorism, as quoted by Fortune: "Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease." Fortune also quotes him as saying AI means "even criminals with very limited skills will be able to target victims at every scale". The same essay, according to CNBC, said AI could be "the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice", and could "accelerate innovation" in clean energy, food and disease. It also called for new national bodies and an international AI organisation. We covered that essay when it came out.

On our reading, his tone in July 2023 was calmer. In a Gates Notes blog post on 11 July 2023, CNN reported, he called AI's risks "manageable" and wrote: "This is not the first time a major innovation has introduced new threats that had to be controlled." He added: "We've done it before."

Why it matters

On our reading, the new part is not Gates's concern about misuse, which he set out a month ago, but the size he put on it in public and his plain "Absolutely" to federal legislation. His own framing matters too. In the interview, he described what AI plus "people with ill intent" could make possible, called the cost of required safeguards "a little bit of overhead", and did not predict a billion-death event, though he said that unless governments insist on safeguards "we will see a lot of big negative things", and called such negatives "imminent".

Update, 27 September 2026: this piece was first published from NBC's pre-broadcast excerpts. On Sunday, NBC published the full interview online; we added Gates's comments on AI's benefits, his statement that there is not a current risk of AI getting completely out of control, his longer-term concern about AI getting out of control by itself, and his remarks on what happens without safeguards, all taken from the captions NBC publishes with the full-interview video.