Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates says no government in the world is ready for the upheaval artificial intelligence is about to cause, and his own $1 billion pledge to shape AI's future raises as many questions as it answers.
Gates, 70, told Reuters in a new interview that governments at every level are failing to grasp the speed and scale of AI's advance. Job losses, cyberattacks, deepening inequality, and user addiction all made his list of looming threats, and he said the people in charge of responding have barely started thinking about any of them.
"I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be... Governments are way behind on this one."
The warning landed in a week already thick with alarm from the technology sector. Several prominent tech executives urged President Trump and global leaders to collaborate on tighter AI industry regulations. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay calling on rival companies to slow their development of AI models, citing fears of recursive self-improvement, the prospect that AI systems could begin upgrading themselves faster than humans can monitor. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX both backed Amodei's call.
Days earlier, AI researcher Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, quit his job and warned that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade."
Gates did not limit his concern to Washington. He framed the challenge in global terms, reaching for a Hollywood analogy to make the point.
"There's all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem. AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It's here, and we better do like it shows in those movies."
Gates said he has been talking to Trump and his team about his AI concerns. He also said he hopes to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year. The specifics of those conversations, what Gates proposed, and what response he received, remain unclear.
That a private billionaire is shuttling between Washington and Beijing on a policy matter this consequential tells you something about the vacuum. Elected governments are supposed to lead on questions that affect every worker, every student, every patient. Gates is filling a gap that Congress and federal agencies have left wide open.
On Tuesday, the Gates Foundation pledged at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand global access to AI and explore ways to use the technology against social inequalities. The money will go to partners in education, healthcare, and agriculture, and toward improving AI training data sets, including efforts to make those data sets work across more languages.
The pledge is part of the foundation's previously announced plans to spend $9 billion annually. Gates highlighted healthcare as a particular opportunity.
"For health it's hard to overstate what the potential is."
A billion dollars sounds enormous. But set against the tens of billions that AI companies are spending on development each quarter, it is a rounding error. And the pledge raises a basic accountability question: who decides where that money goes, what "improving AI training data sets" means in practice, and whether the foundation's priorities align with the public interest or with Gates's own commercial and reputational interests?
The foundation's credibility on that front is not unblemished. Warren Buffett, once the foundation's most prominent outside backer, froze his annual gift to the Gates Foundation for the first time in two decades amid questions about the organization's ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
That freeze deepened into a more permanent break. Buffett eventually cut the Gates Foundation from his annual Berkshire stock gifts altogether as the Epstein cloud over the organization refused to lift.
The Reuters interview was not limited to AI. Gates also addressed the ongoing fallout from his relationship with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a subject that has dogged him for years and that reached a new intensity after the Department of Justice released hundreds of thousands of Epstein files. Those documents showed Epstein's communications with powerful politicians, celebrities, and financiers. Gates and some Gates Foundation staffers were named in the files.
Gates has not been accused of any crimes. But in sworn congressional testimony in June, he admitted to having affairs with two Russian women and claimed Epstein had tried to use that infidelity to blackmail him into reconnecting after they cut ties. Gates testified he was introduced to Epstein in 2011, three years after the disgraced financier pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution and four years after Epstein reached a non-prosecution agreement.
Gates said the relationship ended by December 2014. He has apologized for the connection. An external review of the Gates Foundation found no payments to Epstein and no links to criminal activities, though a separate report noted that congressional investigators have been pressing other billionaires on Epstein-linked financial arrangements as well.
Gates, for his part, insisted the controversy has not cost him influence where it counts.
"In terms of having access to government leaders, or you know, journalists being willing to interview me, I don't see any diminishment."
He added that requests to work with the foundation on reducing child deaths and ending malaria had not decreased "even one iota."
That is a remarkable claim from a man whose oldest philanthropic partner walked away and whose name appeared in a federal document dump alongside those of convicted criminals. Gates may be right that his access to power has survived intact. If so, that says less about his vindication than about how little accountability the billionaire class actually faces. The broader Gates family continues to draw scrutiny on multiple fronts.
Gates is right about one thing: governments are behind. Congress has held hearings, floated frameworks, and produced no binding legislation on AI safety, AI labor displacement, or AI-enabled cyberattacks. Federal agencies have issued guidance documents that carry no enforcement weight. State legislatures are a patchwork. And the international picture is worse, no treaty, no multilateral body, and no shared set of rules governs how AI models are built, trained, or deployed across borders.
Into that vacuum step the billionaires. Gates pledges a billion dollars. Amodei publishes an essay. Altman and Musk sign on. And the public is left to trust that the people building the technology are also the right people to police it.
That is not governance. It is philanthropy dressed up as policy, and it leaves ordinary Americans, the workers whose jobs Gates says AI will erase and the families whose data will train the next model, with no seat at the table and no vote on the outcome.
Gates compared AI to an alien arrival. Fair enough. But in the movies he referenced, it is governments that organize the response, not the guy who sold the aliens the landing pad.