Consider This from NPR - Tech leaders are debating how risky AI is. What does Bill Gates think?

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

AI leaders are warning about the threats posed by further advances of the technology and actively asking it to be regulated. What does Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, think about the future of AI and where it should go?This episode was produced by Connor Donevan and Erika Ryan with audio engineering by Valentina Rodríguez Sanchez. Our director is Jonas Adams.It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon and Tinbete Ermyas.Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorning.Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

It's consider this where every day we go deep on one big news story. Today, decisions about AI that could affect the life of every person on Earth are currently concentrated in the hands of a few fantastically rich tech executives. We will ask Bill Gates, the fantastically rich former tech executive, why he thinks that is a problem. Now, as you have heard a lot on this podcast in recent days, AI companies are warning about threats posed by further advances in AI, and actively asking to be regulated.

The issue we're talking about is there's a collective action problem here. That's Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark speaking with NPR Tuesday. The CEO of his company, Dario Amadeh has called for a slowdown on AI development. It's okay for individual companies to do this and absolutely they will, but what do you do about the whole set of companies that are in deep competition with one another and are to some extent racing to build more and more capable systems. And we'll note here that Anthropic, is a financial supporter of NPR.

Senator Bernie Sanders is proposing a bill that would ban what he calls super-intelligent AI and temporarily halt advanced AI development to give federal regulators time to develop safety standards. Whether you're conservative, whether you're progressive, we want this world to be healthy for our kids, our grandchildren, and future generations. And we've got to err on the side of caution here. Which brings us to Bill Gates, who sees huge potential and huge, peril lurking well short of an AI apocalypse scenario. Consider this. Bill Gates says left to the free market, AI will be designed by and for the richest people in the world. So what does he want to see instead? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

It's Consider This from NPR. Bill Gates is an interesting person to talk to about AI regulation. He was CEO of Microsoft in the 80s and 90s when it was the jugger. or not of the tech world. And the company pushed back hard on the federal government's attempts to check its dominance through antitrust cases. But today, Gates is focused on giving away his fortune through the Gates Foundation, including, he announced Tuesday, $1 billion to expand access to AI tools in order to tackle social inequality. Gates sees AI as a technology that could be an engine for equality or for injustice, depending on what happens over the next year and a half. And that is where we started our conversation.

Since we've heard so many apocalyptic scenarios this week, I want to start with a concrete example from you of how you think AI tools could help lift people from poverty. Well, the Gates Foundation, the majority of its work, is helping low-income countries in health, agriculture, and education. So AI, for example, have you. take a farmer, it can take your photos of your crops, you know, tell you what's going on with the disease. It can give you weather data that you never had before. It can tell you about your soil and what fertilizers you should use.

And it'll understand the market prices and when you should store your crop and when you should sell it. And so it's been phenomenal to see that already hundreds of thousands of farmers in Asia and Africa are using the AI-based tools to make themselves way more productive than before. You talk about those in your writing that you've recently published. You also raise really serious specific concerns, and some of the things that you are flagging are a little different than some of the things we've heard in recent days. You're not just talking about models going rogue, cyber attacks, things like that.

You're talking about society-wide inequities. Can you walk us through some of these specific scenarios that you have become worried about? Well, I think everybody's taxonomy of the concerns is pretty much the same. There's, you know, the biosecurity, cybersecurity, there's the job market and how AI, including future humanoid robots, will affect the job market. There's the psychosocial effects of kids or even adults, having a dependence on the AI for their relationships. And finally, there's the issue of control.

Will the AIs either be under control of bad people or out of human control in a way that's detrimental to all of humanity? And so, believe it or not, we have to address all of those challenges that I call that minimizing the bad, while we. we accelerate the very positive things. And so the billion dollar announcement from the Gates Foundation, where we're going to make sure African languages are very highly accurate, which they're not yet today, that's about accelerating the good uses of AI into health, agriculture, and education. Given that, what was your response when President Trump said earlier this week that he did not see a role

for the federal government regulating it. And he said, the only controller guardrails, and this is a quote that AI needs as a strong and smart, high IQ president. I wish it was that simple. This is a technology that was not developed really with government R&D. And so unlike rockets and nuclear weapons,

where the government has tons of people who understand how quickly it's moving, here the federal government as big and as smart as it is, is really plain catch-up. And so they have to deepen their expertise in biosecurity and cybersecurity. My memo was a rallying cry that people in universities, people in nonprofits, and the government get more engaged in how we accelerate the good and minimize the bad. So I think as the U.S. government,

deepens its expertise, the message to the president will be, these are in fact very, very serious problems that should not be taken lightly. And in the meantime, the main focus is on whether the AI giants self-regulate. And that's something I was interested to hear your take on, because I think you probably understand the Sam Altman's and the Dario Amadez more than anybody else in the world. If an outsider had warned you to slow down when you were building Microsoft in the 80s and 90s, would you have listened? Well, fortunately, you know, nobody ever said that Microsoft Word, you know, was a problem because somebody could type something rude or a ransom note, you know.

Yes, it is very surprising that in my comments on AI, I am saying this is a case where going full speed ahead is not the complete answer. My whole life, I've always said, you know, more PCs, more Internet. You know, I believe innovation can solve almost every problem. But this is such a dual-sided technology that here some degree of slowing down may be important. And I think the industry is not the issue here. The issue is getting all of the rest of society who really controls these tradeoffs to get them up to speed. And so that without reducing the good stuff, significantly, we can make sure to minimize those five all significant areas of potential harm.

I did want to ask, as we talk about these potential solutions, I did felt like I need to ask you about your association in the past with Jeffrey Epstein, because the Gates Foundation has been such a major player on policy. I'm wondering if you are concerned, if you feel like its ability to impact these future conversations to be in the room to make decisions was harmed in any way by this association. Well, certainly I'm very regretful that I spent time with Epstein. I really appreciated the opportunity to go in front of the Congress and go through, you know, meeting by meeting during that three-year period that ended in 2014. what my interactions with him were. You know, I made it clear what I did do.

I did spend time of them, which was a mistake. You know, I never had a social relationship, went to an island, made any payments. So, you know, people should look at that. There are many reasons, you know, I am a billionaire who's benefited from technology. You know, so hopefully I'm just one voice of many. But I tried in my memo to say,

yeah, you can say that I'm not. the perfect messenger, although I'm not sure who is. And on AI, whether it's preventing the worse or putting the guardrails in place or making sure it's distributed in a broader way, how much time do you think we have to get these changes in place before it's too late? I think the sooner we say that models need to not be usable by bioterrorists, the better. the threshold of being capable aiding bio-attacks and cyber attacks, that is being crossed right now. And I know that the models that will come out later this year are far more powerful.

And so there really isn't time to spare. That was Bill Gates, philanthropist and entrepreneur. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. And we will note that the Gates Foundation is a financial supporter of NPR. This episode was produced by Connor Donovan and Erica Ryan. Our director is Jonas Adams. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Wadanan and Tinbeat Airmius.

Our interim executive producer is Courtney Dorney. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.