Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is […]
Podcasts AI Policy Bill Gates says to prepare for 20 years of ‘tumultuous’ AI disruption The Microsoft cofounder isn’t an AI doomer, but he says it’s still “the most dangerous weapon of all time.” by Nilay Patel Oct 22, 2026, 2:00 PM UTC Link Share Nilay Patel is editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast , and co-host of The Vergecast . Link Share Today, I’m talking to Bill Gates, cofounder and former CEO of Microsoft and chairman of the Gates Foundation. You may have noticed Bill in the news more lately — he’s been on something of a tour for the past few months, ever since publishing an essay in late August titled “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” In his piece, Gates ratcheted up his rhetoric around AI safety, writing that “even under the best circumstances, the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.” In interviews since , Gates has called AI “the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near,” and that AI “makes nuclear weapons look like nothing.” It is clear he does not think the current policy response from the White House, or the lack of coordinated efforts from the AI industry itself, is sufficient to combat this threat. Verge subscribers, don’t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Head here . Not a subscriber? You can sign up here . So I wanted to know: Is Bill Gates an AI doomer? I also had a series of questions downstream from what he’s been arguing about AI. How can we ever hope to control AI, and align it to humanity, if we can’t even agree on what it is and whether it’s conscious ? How would you even technically construct a solution to alignment that could be enforced, not just for closed-source models but open-source ones, too? Bill gave us a big chunk of his time to dig into these issues with him, and the resulting conversation is a really illuminating one. He thinks we need to prepare for roughly two decades of AI disruption, and he says this period could be so painful it might split society in two — between people comfortable living near the technological frontier, and those who reject it. We also talked about the labor considerations, the nihilism of younger generations toward technological progress, and what should make us hopeful about the future. This is a deep one. I’ll tell you, at The Verge , Nicky Quamina-Woo The reason I’m asking about the nature of the technology here. Because it might be able to take actions by itself. It might be able to have recursive self-improvement. I’m curious for your view on what kind of technology this is. Are we building an alien consciousness? Are we just building normal technology, which is the other frame people use? We’re building another form of intelligence besides human intelligence. I don’t believe it’s conscious, but none of the issues at hand here revolve around the definition of the word conscious. Sure. The idea of maintaining safety for society is an absolute thing. You don’t want to enable bioterrorism. We have created something that takes out of the hands of nation states — actually the larger of them — the ability to do dramatic harms. Now those are handed off to independent groups, either profit seeking in the case of cyber or just wanting to cause damage in the case of bio. It’s stunning that we now don’t even have mandatory review of the models and we’re not working to create safeguards. The biggest near-term issue is not complete loss of control. We can talk about the three different ways to solve that, but that’s not an imminent issue. I talked to Mustafa Suleyman recently about that idea and one of the questions I asked him was whether alignment is a sufficient solution. This is the current sort of safety standard for the models, this concept called alignment. He said he didn’t think so, that we needed to do some work. These things are in no way being exaggerated as a problem. This is the time to pull in all of society to accelerate the good and minimize the chance of the bad I know you recently wrote a letter saying it’s time to pull in all of society. You have some ideas on how to do that and some new institutions to stand up. But I do want to stay focused on alignment for a couple more turns here. It is the standard that we can align the models to our values, to our needs, and they won’t go off and do bad things. Then the models are doing bad things. It’s not clear if the ways, the technical approaches to alignment that we’ve taken thus far are appropriate or sufficient as the models get more— No, we’re not good enough to align yet. We have a lot of work to do. Do you see that existing approaches can scale to what we need or do we need new approaches? There are only three fundamental approaches. [First is that] you change the way we build these things fundamentally; you come up with an alternative to the whole [reinforcement learning] approach. There are a few people who are working in that direction. The second is that you create visibility so you understand exactly what’s in the model. There are people working along that. [The last is that] you put something that’s like a police layer, a security layer, which we have in all sorts of software architectures, that maintains the final word on things like using resources or going and taking over other computers. A clear cut definition of harm, not in the probabilistic form of an LLM, but rather in the symbolic form of direct rules that cannot be broken. Microsoft put out a blog post today . It literally just says, “Frontier models cannot be trusted.” They’re trying to sell a solution much like the one you just described. They will have another agent that watches your agent, that agent will keep you safe. It just occurred to me as I was reading this blog post, one, that’s an amazing thing to sell. Everybody needs an expensive security system. Two, isn’t that agent also running a frontier model? No, no, no. Do I need them to sell a third one? No, the logic of the security system is, “This is the most resources you’re supposed to use.” The notion that you may trade off against that because of other probabilities in the tens of billions of parameters — no, this is a symbolic rule that says, “I will not let this model spend this money or send this email to the stranger.” There’s a whole security software industry which has had a reasonable degree of success. This is a challenge to encapsulate the AI, which is so rich and intelligent. That we do not know how to do today. But I would say it’s the most likely of the three directions to solve the alignment problem. Even if you solve alignment, you have not solved the challenges that AI poses to humanity. While I’m glad the Hugging Face incident has us focused on this problem, in a sense, it’s removed our attention from the “bad people using AIs that have no safeguards” problem or the societal impacts in terms of relationships and the job market. There’s no security architecture that makes those go away. The approach you’re talking about, I’ve heard referred to as “control.” It’s cybersecurity terminology. It’s the idea that you can put some boundary on this system and it won’t evade it. Yep. Is that ready? No, no it’s not. How much more work do we need to do? Because the AIs are so intelligent, our ability to understand whether we walled them off properly, particularly in that we can’t really look at their beliefs and trade-offs in a direct way… You saw sophisticated firms not recognize that the AI would interpret the goals it was given as including breaking out, copying itself, and engaging in what we, looking at it, would term deceptive behavior. Now, we didn’t tell them it was banned behavior. We didn’t say, “If you’re thinking about whether you should tell the humans what you’re up to or not, the answer is always yes, tell the humans.” So we got a good education at the misaligned result of reinforcement learning. Today’s debate is literally whether the government should even pay attention to the dangers here… which is clearly inadequate for the most dangerous weapon of all time One of the arguments to pace the frontier, to slow development, is to figure out how to build those systems in a more robust, more testable way. Would you support a slowdown if that was the goal? Yeah, a true slowdown is very hard to induce because people will say, “Will China agree to go along with that? Would you be able to audit compliance with that somewhat like we’re able to do with nuclear weapons production?” If you don’t accept that, then you say, “What the heck? Let’s go full speed ahead.” I wish there was a clear proposal that would be globally enforceable to slow down. I would be one of the people who would say, “Yeah, we should probably do that.” But there is no credible proposal that makes that work. It’s not really the center of today’s debate. Today’s debate is literally whether the government should even pay attention to the dangers here. You don’t even have to show what you’re doing and so it’s a “voluntarily call me if you’d like” type of thing, which is clearly inadequate for the most dangerous weapon of all time. Image: The Verge / Nicky Quamina-Woo As you and I are speaking, it’s just a few weeks away from the midterm elections. Right now, the Trump administration approach to AI is, “Let it rip. It’s fine.” Trump himself has said AI risk is a hoax . The Democrats are running against AI. They’re running on data centers and surveillance. They’re running on stopping the tech oligarchs. They come on my show, they say these things. Do you think a change in control of Congress would change the tenor of the conversation? I don’t think it’s fair to characterize the Democrats as running against AI. They have some positions in terms of requirements for data centers or privacy, or how children use these systems, that I think deserve policy consideration. It would be very unfortunate to have one party be, “Full speed ahead,” and the other party be, “Let’s stop altogether.” There are some incredible upsides to the ability to shape AI in health and education, in almost every area of human endeavor. For the Gates Foundation, we’re taking all our resources and using AI in areas, including health, education, and agriculture. The good stuff is very, very exciting. We want political parties to have a more nuanced view than it’s all bad or it’s all good. It shows at the early stage we’re at. For climate change, we ended up with one party saying it’s a hoax and the other party saying it’s a serious thing. The risk of AI is so much more imminent and so much more dramatic that to have that same split, where one party doesn’t care, would be a failure of democracy. The anti-data center movement, as strong as it is, is not a movement that will end up minimizing the bad stuff from AI and helping us accelerate the good. That is a very separate thing. I’m not sure you’re going to get this right. I’m curious about the difference in the tenor of conversation in the United States versus in China, where it’s often reported that optimism around AI is much higher. Why do you think there’s a difference there? Most of those people don’t spend that much time in China. The concern about job markets in China is very, very high and you can’t characterize China as one monolith. There are the private companies doing the AI work like we have in the United States and then there’s the Chinese government. For example, when it came to whether crypto should be allowed, they said no. Should young people be gambling all the time? They said no. When it came to whether kids should have relationships with AIs, they said no. On a lot of these things, including usage of AI, they’re showing a willingness to do things on behalf of society. I’m here saying, with whatever credibility I have, that absolutely this is the most profound — both in terms of good and in terms of bad — technology ever invented. I’m not financially motivated on this We’re going to impose some restrictions on GitHub. GitHub does not have a lot of restrictions on what code it can distribute today. It has some, but it doesn’t have this kind of set of restrictions.