Bill Gates says governments are unprepared for AI; foundation pledges $1 billion

Bill Gates, Microsoft's co-founder and chair of the Gates Foundation, said in an interview with Reuters that no government in the world is adequately prepared for the changes artificial intelligence will bring, warning of risks to jobs, cybersecurity and users becoming dependent on AI companions. The Gates Foundation said on Sept. 15 that it plans to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on expanding access to AI, part of its previously announced plans to spend about $9 billion annually. Gates said he has raised his concerns with U.S. President Donald Trump and his team and aims to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping later in 2026.

According to the Gates Foundation, the $1 billion will go to partners working in education, healthcare and agriculture, and toward strengthening the data foundations that AI systems rely on, including ensuring that large language models work in every language people speak. Gates said of health applications, from supporting frontline health care workers to discovering new drugs and vaccines, that the potential is hard to overstate. He said AI could help narrow gaps between the richest and poorest countries rather than widen them, if it is managed carefully and access is distributed fairly.

In the Reuters interview reported by The Straits Times, The New York Post and The Times of India, Gates said, 'I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be,' and added, 'Governments are way behind on this one.' He cited threats to jobs, concerns about cyberattacks and the danger of addiction to AI companions. He described AI as 'kind of like this alien intelligence,' comparing the situation to films in which the United States, China and others set aside differences to confront a common alien threat, and said the world should respond similarly.

In a separate broadcast interview with NPR's All Things Considered, reported by CT Public, Gates listed five areas of concern: biosecurity, cybersecurity, effects on the job market including future humanoid robots, the psychosocial effects of children or adults depending on AI for relationships, and the question of control. He said AI could turn out to be 'the worst source of injustice' — the phrase used in CT Public's headline — and said the approach must be to minimise the harms while accelerating beneficial uses.

CT Public reported that Trump said earlier in the week that he did not see a role for the federal government in regulating AI and that the only guardrails AI needs are 'a strong and smart, high-IQ president.' Asked about that, Gates said he wished it were that simple, noting that AI was not developed with government research funding and that, unlike rockets and nuclear weapons, the federal government is playing catch-up on understanding how fast the technology is moving. He said his memo was a call for universities, nonprofits and government to engage more in accelerating benefits and reducing harms, and that as the U.S. government deepens its expertise, the message to the president will be that these are very serious problems.

CT Public also reported Gates' description of AI uses in agriculture, saying tools can identify crop disease from photographs, provide weather and soil data and market price information, and that hundreds of thousands of farmers in Asia and Africa are already using AI-based tools. He said his own long-standing optimism about technology made his current caution notable, adding that he believes the industry is not the main issue and that the rest of society, which controls the trade-offs, needs to catch up.

The New York Post reported that tech leaders began raising alarms after Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who previously worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned and warned that AI 'could kill us all by the end of the decade.' According to The New York Post, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei then published an essay calling on rival companies to slow development, citing recursive self-improvement, and OpenAI's Sam Altman and SpaceX founder Elon Musk backed it. The newspaper also reported that several technology executives urged Trump and global leaders that week to collaborate on stricter industry regulation.

The New York Post and The Straits Times reported on Gates' testimony to Congress in June about his past association with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Gates has not been accused of any crimes and has apologised for the relationship, describing it as a grave error in judgment; an external review at his foundation found no payments to Epstein and no links to criminal activity. Gates said the association had not diminished his access to government leaders or willingness of journalists to interview him, and that demand for the foundation's expertise on child deaths and malaria had not fallen.

The Jerusalem Post, citing a Reuters interview ahead of the foundation's annual Goalkeepers event, reported that Gates said eradicating measles is no longer a foundation goal because of vaccine hesitancy in wealthy countries, which he called 'kind of tragic.' The newspaper attributed the rise in vaccine scepticism in part to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now U.S. health secretary under President Trump, describing him as having championed such scepticism for decades. Gates said hesitancy has not increased in the lower-income countries where the foundation works, and that aid cuts led by the Trump administration and followed by countries such as the UK and Germany had likely caused deaths, though the most dire predictions of more than 10 million deaths were not materialising.

Where sources differ

• Sources differ on how definite a meeting between Gates and Chinese President Xi Jinping is: The New York Post says Gates is 'hoping to meet' him later this year, The Straits Times says he 'aims to meet' him later in 2026, and The Times of India says he 'intends' to meet him later this year.
• The New York Post reports that Anthropic's Dario Amodei published an essay calling on rival companies to slow development, while in the same article it refers to Altman and Musk backing 'Amodei's letter' — the source does not reconcile the two descriptions.

• No source establishes where or exactly when the Reuters interview took place, or whether the AI remarks and the measles remarks come from the same interview or from separate ones.
• No government, including the White House and the Chinese government, is quoted responding to Gates' claim that governments are unprepared for AI; his assessment is not independently verified in the sources.
• The sources do not set out what specific regulations or policies Gates wants governments to adopt.
• It is not established whether the $1 billion has been disbursed or committed, nor which specific organisations will receive it.
• The claim that aid cuts likely caused many deaths is not quantified in the sources, and the figure of more than 10 million deaths appears only as a prediction Gates says has not been borne out.
• Jacob Coxon's warning is reported without supporting evidence or independent verification.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is described as having championed vaccine scepticism, but no source gives his response to that characterisation or to Gates' remarks on measles eradication.
• The sources do not state whether President Trump or President Xi Jinping has responded to Gates' outreach.

1. CT Public — original — by Scott Detrow, Erika Ryan, Patrick Jarenwattananon
2. New York Post — by Taylor Herzlich
3. The Times of India — by TOI TECH DESK
4. The Jerusalem Post — by REUTERS
5. The Straits Times — by The Straits Times

Read the original at CT Public

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