Technology
PUBLISHED
Bill Gates has warned AI is "the most dangerous technology humans ever invented," and it’s likely to lead to "a lot of negative surprises" when it's exploited by “bad people.”
Humans are still the concern... for now
Speaking to the media, the Microsoft co-founder suggested that the proliferation of AI is set to unleash a deluge of cybersecurity attacks within the next year.
While he believes that out-of-control AI could become a real problem in the future, Gates argues the more pressing concern is humans taking advantage of the new technology for nefarious ends.
“The real danger right now is not the AIs getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have. It's really bad people using AI, particularly an AI where you can take out all the safeguards,” Gates said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.
“When you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that’s where over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises,” he added.
Gates suggested that bad actors could use AI to launch cyberattacks that hold a person, organization, or government to ransom, forcing them to pay large sums of money or grant favors. They could also use AI to trigger a disruption in the stock market and place bets in advance to profit from it.
In the past, it would have required a decent amount of expertise in computer technology, finance, etc. to execute an attack like this, but AI has made it significantly easier for criminals with a very limited skill set and minimal funding to do so at scale.
AI and the threat of bioweapons
Another big worry, according to Gates, is the threat of bioweapons and human-made disease outbreaks. In a August 2026 essay, he wrote at length about the dangers of AI being used maliciously, including the manipulation of pathogens and the use of novel bioweapons.
“Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease. Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones. This is a global problem,” the tech mogul wrote.
Expanding on the essay in an interview with MIT Technology Review, he added that he views the threat of bioterrorism as "about 50 times more scary, more likely than a natural pandemic risk."
These concerns are not exactly new
Gates has been sounding this alarm for a long time, relatively speaking. Back in 2017, when AI was an idiotic fledgling compared to today, he stated that tech-enabled bioweapons could someday have the potential to kill tens of millions of people.
“The next epidemic has a good chance of originating on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus or a contagious and highly deadly strain of flu,” he told a security conference in Munich.
In the same 2017 speech, he also made a forecast for the “next pandemic,” almost exactly three years before COVID-19 became a global disaster.
“Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists show through their models that a respiratory-spread pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And there is a reasonable probability of that taking place in the years ahead,” he said.
