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Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development (cnn.com) 109

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates argued on Wednesday that artificial intelligence needs significant limits or else the harm to humans will outweigh any potential good. "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice," he said in a 6,000-word essay, entitled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." [...] "Even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history," he said, adding that "I don't see evidence that leaders, experts, and communities are confronting the challenges adequately. There is no plan to ease the entry into the AI era." AI can provide great benefits in field like agriculture and medicine, he argued, such as breakthroughs in preventing and treating diseases. But he also noted that the transition carries big risks, like widespread unemployment, harming the educational and social development of children, or making it easier for criminals and bad actors -- or AI itself -- to cause deliberate harm.

"As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," he warned. These significant risks must be controlled quickly, Gates said. "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it," he wrote. "However, I don't think that's going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead." In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper that will air on Wednesday evening, Gates said AI models have gotten dramatically more powerful at a rate faster than he expected. "They're now capable of causing cyberattack risk, bioterrorism risk, psychosocial risk," he said. "I have to say I'm kind of shocked that the exact criteria that we review these models with, and the actions we take to minimize the harms, are really completely missing."

In his essay, Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax in order to slow the shift away from using human labor. He also wants to set aside some work to be done by humans only. "My message to leaders is: You have a chance to act now, before unemployment rises sharply, communities are hurting, and public trust has eroded," he said. "You can make sure AI benefits everyone. And you can work with other governments to meet this national and global challenge."

Bill Gates Proposes Major Limits On AI Development

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @11:34PM (#66308936)

    Why is it always the guys who don't understand why their wife left them

  • $$'s and FOMO (Score:4, Interesting)

    by high_rolla ( 1068540 ) on Wednesday August 26, 2026 @11:40PM (#66308946) Homepage

    Sounds great in theory, unfortunately I fear that greed and FOMO will trump any effort to put boundaries in place.

    Hopefully the bubble bursts before we get to this point and the trough of disillusionment slows things down a bit, giving us a chance to catch up.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Hopefully the bubble bursts before we get to this point and the trough of disillusionment slows things down a bit, giving us a chance to catch up.

      It is looking pretty good for that at this time. The essentially deeply fraudulent financing of the AI pushers is getting very dicey at the moment. And the evidence for severe problems with the technology is getting better and finds more things.

      Obviously, the AI cultists will deny everything and hallucinate a bright future.

      • AI is very good at some things, and very bad at others. There are scenarios where it is so much better than humans that it essentially eliminates an entire field of study [wikipedia.org] and also scenarios where it is laughably bad (you can find almost infinite examples online).

        All LLMs are AI, not all AIs are LLMs. Do not confuse the two.

        Since you are obviously an AI sceptic, I would assume you avoid LLMs and therefore have no reference for their capabilities today. So, even if we only consider LLMs, AI is demonstrably be

  • Windows (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

    Someone needs to end this crazy tyrant's empire, though I suppose it's too late for that. He's so diversified at this point that ending Microsoft won't materially impact him.

    That said, it'd be great if the thing he built could be ended - perhaps by reimplementing Windows functionality through reverse engineering, minus the crap.

    Just enough to get it to work with the things we still need to run on Windows - then replace the kernel.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      That said, it'd be great if the thing he built could be ended - perhaps by reimplementing Windows functionality through reverse engineering, minus the crap.

      The problem with that is that "the crap" is the Windows API and the culture of "software development" MS has created and fostered. It is all rotten. Fortunately, quite a bit will not make it under the EU CRA. That should sent pretty strong signals and will create alternatives. The cost of insecure and hard to use software is impressively high at this time.

      • Even if Windows was open sourced tomorrow, stem to stern, who would even want it? It's full of immensely cobbled code, patched 200x, and still barely works.

        You can't see the code today. Open source at least give you that. You can only poke an amorphous code base, or alternately, pray.

        Prayer never helped me much.

        Visible code did.

    • I am not convinced that any significant number of people are staying with Microsoft because of some Windows only app.

      The last two people I tried to get to move to Mac OS easily crushed that recommendation:
      "No Delete key on a MacBook, pressing function + delete is annoying; I will just buy a Windows laptop with an actual delete key."
      "I want a touchscreen laptop"

      I walk past my fellow developers at work who are typing proudly on their expensive MacBooks, typing into Microsoft Visual Studio Code...

      For me I just

      • I never have that experience because Windows doesn't do anything well. You bring up mouse input but what about the clicks that never occur? They have the problem with eating keystrokes too. Also when the system is loaded control key activation is detected later than other key presses so a control-v just becomes a "v", this usually happens to me multiple times a day. All office windows of a certain type are in a single process and block each other while saving. I could go on all day, Windows is just wholly i

        • by gtall ( 79522 )

          Ditto. I might add that my Macbooks have delete keys. I find the Windows gui obnoxious, and it still feels like a Hasbro toy interface suitable for 5 yr olds.

          • The key labeled "Delete" on your MacBook keyboard is backspace for a Windows user, and requires holding function for delete functionality.
            Never bothered me since I use a full keyboard attached to my MacBook, but it was a surprising argument I had no rebuttal to.

            I would say a toy generally has dumbed down functionality and flashy colors, which would describe the appearance of MacOS.
            But hey I would love to see you use MacOS, maybe I would learn something; I use it every day and find it much more obtuse and sl

        • I have never seen a missed click or eaten keyboard stroke myself, no v's instead of what I want pasted; perhaps it is your hardware?
          Do go on all day, I would love ammunition against Windows, you have provided me with nothing I can reliably cite or reproduce.
          I go between two Mac OS machines and a Windows machine on a daily basis and find the Windows machine to be the much more pleasant experience.
          I paid a hell of a lot more for the Mac OS machines as well, and would be happy to retire the Windows machine; bu

          • I have never seen a missed click or eaten keyboard stroke myself, no v's instead of what I want pasted; perhaps it is your hardware?

            The same keyboard never produces these results on my Linux systems, so no.

            • Since you mentioned mouse clicks along with keyboard strokes I would have assumed further upstream than the keyboard if the two issues were related.
              However I am skeptical it is intrinsic to Windows since I have never encountered nor heard of such an issue.
              My keyboard was literally $3 from micro center (they seem to attract liquid and the water proof ones were no fun to type on) and never misses a keystroke in Windows, Mac OS, and Linux with a KVM in between.
              It sounds infuriating, I would probably have tosse

      • Yeah, there are a bunch of annoyances. Some they got rid of after decades of stubbornness, like only resizing windows by one corner.

        The worst for me is the cmd key sits right next to the space bar. Makes copy/paste so much more difficult. Don't think they'll ever change that.

        Windows UI seems snappier.

        • On one of my Mac OS machines I use a Windows keyboard which places the Command Key (windows key) a bit further left and helps, but still to your point the Ctrl key for copy and paste is more comfortable.

          But command+v and command+c is one of my favorite things about Mac OS out of the box. I hate trying to copy from PowerShell Windows or Terminal in Linux; I generally end up terminating my process by accident a few times before I remember I am not on Mac OS.

          I think you are correct on the Windows UI being snap

  • My favorite line from his entire post "I proposed a robot tax years ago and most of the reaction was that it was a strange idea." ... at least Billy G seems to have some recognition his ideas are dumb.

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Thursday August 27, 2026 @12:35AM (#66308990)

    Talk about trying to close the barn doors after the horse has bolted! You're only waiting until there are a gillion datacenters going up to talk? Oh wait, no, it's not that at all because fuck the environment, right?

    "As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control,"

    See, it's all about losing the certainty that people like him have been afforded in life. Frankly, I hope they lose total control of the situation and are forced to shut everything down, only to be faced with the dire consequences of their actions. Fuck all the people that don't give a fuck until it could possibly impact them because they are the same assholes who want tax breaks and think empathy is a weakness.

  • It's dumb to try to stifle it when it's just developing. For one thing, AI can't take anyone's job. Increasing production has never in history resulted in job loss. Theoretically, ROBOTS can cause job loss. But even that is dumb to over-regulate at this early stage. Robots need at least 20 years of advancement before they start replacing human jobs. Think about it, cars are already capable of autonomous driving .. and have been for 5 years (in the case of Waymo) .. yet they haven't caused even one taxi driv

    • "Over regulating" robotics would prevent widespread use of robotic labor from ever becoming common.

    • Re:WTF (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Thursday August 27, 2026 @01:11AM (#66309022) Journal

      AI can't take anyone's job.

      I'll see your "WTF" and raise you a *facepalm*. AI already has taken jobs, including customer service (support calls and online chats), writing and editing, and entry-level coding.

      Increasing production has never in history resulted in job loss.

      It has when the increased production is due to transformative new technologies that can perform a human's job faster and better. Like, oh say, AI.

      Theoretically, ROBOTS can cause job loss. But even that is dumb to over-regulate at this early stage. Robots need at least 20 years of advancement before they start replacing human jobs.

      We don't need to wait 20 years for that. Robots alreay have caused job-loss in industries like manufacturing, for example.

    • It's dumb to try to stifle it when it's just developing. For one thing, AI can't take anyone's job. Increasing production has never in history resulted in job loss.

      This is ahistorical nonsense and demonstrably untrue. Don't just make shit up to support your arguments.

      The introduction of the loom caused massive unemployment in the garment industry. Where I live in Western Australia, mine automation has dramatically reduced the mining workforce whilst increasing production. Improvements in Automotive manufact

      • The loom caused job gains overall. More garments sold, more retail jobs, jobs in fashion.

        • Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)

          by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Thursday August 27, 2026 @04:32AM (#66309144)
          Lies and Statistics:

          The loom made old tradespeople (30+) permanently unemployed, but employed children (4-8) to replace them. Total jobs increased, total wages lower, more garments sold at cheaper prices, lots of people in permanent poverty, lots of kids with crippling injuries.

        • by dryeo ( 100693 )

          The labour participation numbers have dropped from something like 95% to maybe a third. Some of that is good, children taken out of the labour force, old people getting to retire, women becoming stay at home wives without having to spend the day spinning yarn for a penny a day and such. On the other hand, the streets are full of homeless people, basements full of unemployed young people, all kinds of people on disability though they could often be working etc.
          Even back in the time of the loom, it took 70 ye

      • Overall, mine automation is increasing jobs. And that's direct jobs not just more jobs from the mines production downstream applications. From Gemini: The industry has experienced long-term, consecutive expansion driven by global demand for critical minerals and steel inputs:8-Year Growth Streak: Prior to its current plateau, the sector achieved eight consecutive years of year-over-year employment growth.Long-Term Surge: Mine site employment has surged by 65% since 2016. This added roughly 140,000 direct an

        • You used AI to determine that AI is not taking away jobs.

        • So we've spent the last 40 some odd years automating everything we can get our hands on. We didn't automate meat cutters and burger flippers though. There's some people playing around with that but it's mostly for advanced robotics research. We focused on high paying jobs because of course we did.

          So the guy doing mining making 100K a year got his job automated away and now he can go work at Walmart selling cheap crap made with the stuff pulled out of the mine.

          The problem is that you're replacing 100
    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      For one thing, AI can't take anyone's job.

      While mostly true, for my things this only becomes obvious years later, for example when LLM use has made a code-base completely unmaintainable or an industry cannot get any senior engineers because if failed to hire junior ones. The typical C-level idiot thinks as far as next quarter. Hence while LLMs cannot replace people in most cases (and the productivity gains, such as they are, will probably not translate to revenue gains), the damage done until that become obvious will be spectacular.

    • It's dumb to try to stifle it when it's just developing. For one thing, AI can't take anyone's job. Increasing production has never in history resulted in job loss.

      The one thing I'll give Billy credit for is avoidance of this same inductive trap:

      "Another reason people underestimate AI is that analogies to the effects of past innovations are misleading. We have no experience with a technology that can be adopted quickly or that can think and move like a human. "

      Think about it, cars are already capable of autonomous driving .. and have been for 5 years (in the case of Waymo) .. yet they haven't caused even one taxi driver or truck driver to lose his job. There are more uber drivers than before the pandemic

      There has never been even a single level 5 self driving car that has ever existed. The difference in value (and associated disruption) between cars that can mostly drive themselves and cars that can fully drive

      • "There has never been even a single level 5 self driving car that has ever existed."

        Waymos may not be "level 5" .. since they haven't fully tested it in blizzards -- but it works in dense urban areas with lunatic San Francisco pedestrians. Waymo also tested it in New York City which has the craziest of all traffic, and it passed (though the Mayor banned it because he said it would take away jobs). But forget Waymo .. I have a Tesla Model Y which has (supervised) FSD, but I've never had to intervene critical

        • I have a Tesla Model Y which has (supervised) FSD, but I've never had to intervene critically and it's been thousands of miles. You realize I just get in the car enter an address and it goes there parking-spot to parking-spot -- zero intervention of any kind in all kinds of traffic -- it handles roundabouts that humans have trouble with. Yet nobody who doesn't actually have Tesla FSD believes it works. Nothing we can do or say makes you guys believe it really and truly works. We can show all the stats ..

          To claim that the gap to level 5 is "astronomical" is plain wrong. If Tesla removes the "supervised" label from their FSD .. people aren't going to magically flock to buying Teslas. It will take a years, the same as it took some years for people to really switch to touchscreen smartphones.

          The value gap is indeed astronomical as I stated. Self driving is a long tail problem. Technical progression along the tail doesn't have much effect on the underlying value proposition.

          In a Tesla model-y a licensed driver is required to sit in the drivers seat with their hand on the wheel. The driver is required at all times to retain full situational awareness and be ready at a moments notice to intervene. A Tesla model-y can't pick you up from work. It can't run errands for you. It can't be sent off

    • AI can destroy jobs by destroying the businesses that have inexplicitly decided to rely on it.

      Of course, Gates is far too part of the tech establishment in this country to actually say that.

  • Gotta nip Bill in the bud...
  • I would describe AI as it is now as being in a kind of Napster phase. It is taking a lot of other people's work and claiming it as its own. Regularly when I see a coworker generate an image or an explanation, I can easily find the lifted work with the same google search.

    As a creator, my stuff gets fed into these engines. The output comes back to me when a fellow human being is showing me something that is both ripping off my work and when they are snidely telling me that my kind of work is no longer neede

    • I don't see democracy disappearing because of AI. I see it getting attacked by humans who have conscripted AI for that purpose. Specifically, to manufacture deepfake media content that deceives the voting public.

      For now I'd rather see democracy as the solution instead of the victim. But it can only be a solution if we defend it.

      And AI isn't "claiming" anyone else's work as its own. It's just an algorithm, doing what it was trained to do. I get what you're saying though: it is trained on the content of human

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Aye, defend Democracy. There was movement called Technocracy back in 1930s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy). The argument was that Democracy was failing and it was failing because people were stupid. What the followers claimed was needed was technocrats who would take over governance and make all the decisions because they were smart and regular folks were dumb. At least in the U.S., FDR came along and wiped the slate clean of those yokels.

        Today, we have Silicon Valley and its goomers (Ray Kurzwe

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      I don't see this continuing indefinitely.

      The LLM hype is already running out of training material. And it only ever started because the assholes behind it stole everything they could lay their hands on. They will have known back then that all they were creating was a straw-fire. But obviously, they did hope to cash out really big before it comes crashing down. Looks like that will not not be happening.

  • "Don't open Pandora's Box !"

    Telling people not to do it is not going to stop someone, somewhere doing it.
    And I don't think governments can physically stop them even if they want to stop them.

    I genuinely fear that humanity's only hope for survival is that LLM AIs plateaus before AGI.
    I think they will.

    That doesn't mean another type of AI will not reach AGI and destroy us all.
    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      LLMs cannot do AGI. No chance, ever. LLMs are just somewhat capable search engines in an unified sea of data that was harder to search before because it was not-unified and unstructured. There is a pretty impressive NLP interface on top and since it talks many dumb people think it is intelligent. That even happened with Eliza back when and has nothing to do with the tech actually being good. But LLMs can only do statistics. They cannot do insight, and what gets misnamed "reasoning" in the LLM space is actua

  • by Cyberpunk Reality ( 4231325 ) on Thursday August 27, 2026 @03:49AM (#66309114)

    This is just stage setting for moats to protect big, established players down the road.

    Your cheap, local, open (and/or foreign) AI might be a dangerous threat to all humanity! Bill Gates says that you cannot in good conscience be allowed to own or operate such things, or at the very least there must be a level of regulation and taxation that is ruinous on the would-be small scale AI operator. Only the wise and experienced OpenAI and its equivalents - which by sheer coincidence have deep connections to Microsoft and Gates fellow billionaires - can be trusted to provide society with the massive benefits of AI. In return for government subsidies and a generous private profit of course. But don't worry! In the spirit of philanthropy, Gates will promise that some of the benefits of AI will trickle down to the masses.

  • by votsalo ( 5723036 ) on Thursday August 27, 2026 @04:56AM (#66309160)

    The summary links to the wrong place on Gates' blog. Here is the correct one [gatesnotes.com]. But the pages are all mixed together so that as you scroll down you get to a different topic and the url changes.

    A good limit on AI development would be to allow it to grow only with renewable power, so that it does not accelerate climate change. If you scroll down Gates blog, you'll see his thoughts on climate change. But there is no mention of it in "The choices we make about AI" essays. As if the world's problems are unrelated to each other.

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      As if the world's problems are unrelated to each other.

      The two articles were probably written by two different ghost-writers.

  • The obvious breakthrough would be for AI to develop an easy way to factor large prime numbers.
  • Yeah you can put limits on AI development, but they will just be ignored as too much (financial) is at stake. Some public companies will abide by the restriction, but many private companies and certainly security/militairy agencies won't.
  • There e is a danger of AI destroying our civilisation. But I suspect that is not because AI will get massively smarter or some how conspire against us. No the danger is here already and it is cause by AI in the hands of humans.

    Bear with me.

    Take a look a YouTube, take note of the massive and ever growing percentage of AI generate slop there. Take a look at LinkedIn, take note of the massive and ever growing amount of slop there.

    Slop, growing all the time, massive amounts of untrustworthy information. Pushed

  • is a comment from Bill Gates more important than a comment from Elon Musk or Larry Ellison or Mark Zuckerberg? Since he's a billionaire his comments are obviously more important than those of mere peasants even if they happen to have a sh*tload of degess.
    • is a comment from Bill Gates more important than a comment from Elon Musk or Larry Ellison or Mark Zuckerberg?

      A comment from Bill Gates who got an STD on Epstein island and then wanted Epstein to get him antibiotics that he could sneak into his wife's food to treat it has severe negative value.

      When combined with the facts about Microsoft and AI (Bill having ~$50B in stock and nobody wanting CoPilot) this is solely an attempt to save face and preserve the value of his portfolio by preparing the market for Microsoft to pull back from their AI investments as they have no apparent route to profitability.

      Bill Gates shou

  • "If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it,"

    OK. Here's a valid credible plan, backed by the need for humans to be life-sustaining employed.

    Turn It The Fuck Off.

    After you hire Wisdom and Experience back again, you can label it the Pointless Humor Generator the write-off always should have been.

    You're either worried about being left behind, or you're worried about destroying your economy. Every country is going to have to pick a lane as the continue to sponsor AI Greed decimating human employment.

    If we think humans with three-digit IQs are fed up

    • by Tom ( 822 )

      AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

      As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

      What it does have is dat

      • AI isn't actually smart. It's an at best average intelligence thing with an insane amount of available knowledge. Like the village idiot with eidetic memory.

        As soon as you do any work with AI that's not available as a ready-to-apply solution from its training data, you begin to notice how much you need to correct it, keep it on track, remind it of basic constraints you already mentioned five times, etc. - it's performing at a level I'd accept from an intern, but not from a co-worker.

        This only reinforces why I often refer to it as Toddler-grade AI. Able to take basic instructions but with a lot of hand-holding. Sure, autistic with data, but data is not information. Value is what turns data into information. Integrity retains that value.

        What it does have is data. Tons of data. Any question that would take you and me half an hour on Google and Wikipedia to answer it can answer in 10 seconds. That's a great tool. It is not intelligence, however.

        What you have, is a society becoming increasingly addicted to using a Single Source of All-Knowing 'Truth'. Every time.

        The next multi-national cybersecurity war centers around attacking Information Integrity relentlessly, because once you manipulate

  • Gates proposed taxing AI or robots the way you would pay a human employee's payroll tax

    Unless we also roll out ubiquitous surveillance through a Vingean "Secure Hardware Environment"-like scenario where people aren't fully in charge of their own computers, I don't see how anyone could possibly detect whether or not I'm running any LLMs. Much like private DMCA violations (e.g. playing a CSS-protected DVD that you purchased, without getting authorization from the copyright owner first), it wouldn't have to in

  • Bill Gates should burn in hell.


  • It should be this link:
    The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.
    https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/work-section-topic/reader/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make

    Currently, it is pointing to his January 21, 2026 essay on AI usage in healthcare:
    Expanding access to health care through AI
    https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/make-ai-work-for-everyone/reader/expanding-access-to-health-care-through-ai
  • How is this "news that matter"?

    Bill Gates is an old man who has zero AI credentials and has long ago become irrelevant. Not to mention his previous predictions of future developments are not exactly brilliant.

    • Bill owns a lot of Microsoft and controls even more money through his foundation, formerly his and his wife's foundation before he gave her an Epstein Island STD

      • by Tom ( 822 )

        Global AI tech spending is said to surpass 2.5 trillion this year.

        Sorry, Gates is a small fish in that pond.

  • The only unemployment harm caused by AI will be inflicted by so-called "leaders" who fire people because they don't understand the limits of the technology.

  • The people who should / are worrying about this the most are the wealthy and powerful.

    If AGI ever becomes a reality ( and that's a big IF ) the elite class will quickly be bumped down
    a notch to second class citizens just like the rest of the World.

    They literally have far more to lose than the rest of us and that scares the shit out of them.

  • "...or the worst source of injustice"

    Or both? Like most of modern society's advancements? We have both air conditioning and laser-guided missiles. We have the most food in history and a lot of starving people worldwide. The car both unlocks people's ability to do more, and poisons them/the environment. It's not either/or, it's tradeoffs.

    "As the models become more powerful, they could begin to act against our interests and we could lose control"

    This will never happen, and the proof is Bill's own words. He i

  • We should use AI to limit Bill Gates

    It's only fair since it was his idea.
  • There's a lot of Venn overlap between people spooked by AI and people who hate Bill Gates because of 5G microchips in COVID vaccines (pick a conspiracy theory, I guess).

    AI Protestor: "Down with AI!"
    Bill Gates: "AI can be dangerous. We need to be careful."
    Same AI Protestor: "... More AI!"

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