President Trump is set to meet with AI leaders about the technology's safety on Tuesday after Bill Gates over the weekend laid out a stark warning about artificial intelligence's potential dangers. CBS News' Nancy Cordes reports.
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What Bill Gates said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Bill Gates warned that AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths, calling it the most dangerous weapon when combined with ill intent. He criticized government ignorance of AI risks, noting that unlike nuclear weapons, AI emerged from the private sector, leaving officials with little expertise in bioattack and cyberattack capabilities. Gates dismissed the proposed kill switch as insufficient, arguing that insight and records are needed to moderate bad behavior. He described AI as an evolutionary event creating an intelligent species that will become 'insanely smarter' than humans. Gates favored congressional and global regulation, suggesting President Trump could be persuaded despite his 'full speed ahead' stance. He emphasized the need for safeguards and monitoring capabilities as essential. The conversation also touched on an upcoming White House meeting with AI executives, with Gates arguing that kill switches alone would not prevent tragedies.
Key takeaways
AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths, a warning Gates explicitly stated.
Gates called government AI expertise 'so little' and urged safeguards and monitoring.
Gates said AI is creating an intelligent species 'insanely smarter' than humans.
He argued for regulation and believed Trump could be talked into it.
1 billion deaths. Even if you're a natural-born skeptic or a hard-bitten cynic, those three words, 1 billion deaths, well, they take your breath away. Bill Gates said them when asked by NBC's Meet the Press about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence.
AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths. So even though it's pretty hard to get to 100%, there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.
Gates favors congressional and global regulation of artificial intelligence. And he said he believes President Trump could be talked into that and talked away from his current fast and furious development mindset. The problem now, Gates said, is those in government, Trump included, are simply too far behind the knowledge curve and need to catch up.
Most dangerous technologies the government understands because they funded the research or they're an important customer for nuclear bombs or rockets or things like that. AI has emerged from the private sector and so the depth of understanding of these dangerous thresholds that were crossed literally this year, bioattack capability, cyber attack capability, and others, you have so little expertise in the government. And you know, because it's cast in this nationalistic, you know, us versus them type thing, you have people who are saying, 'Well, let's just go full speed ahead.' It's completely irresponsible not to require every AI to have these safeguards and monitoring capabilities.
Top AI executives are coming to the White House tomorrow. A meeting organized in part by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Worry about AI dangers has cropped up somewhat late in this midterm election conversation. It is adjacent to the data center backlash which has been bubbling for months and on balance jeopardizing more Republicans than Democrats. Johnson is bullish on both AI and data centers but knows he and Trump need to show some level of curiosity if not concern.
We do not need a moratorium. We do not need to jump in and hyperregulate this because we'll lose the race to China. The innovation is important to continue but we have to strike the right balance. That's what the conversation is going to be about. We want to make sure that it's being done in a safe way. So, a little oversight, a little transparency, I think, would go a long way here.
There is legislation in Congress to mandate something called a kill switch on AI models. You might remember we discussed that on this program last week. Gates along with others in the AI space say that kill switch idea less helpful than it sounds.
8 more exchanges in this transcript
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Gates, B. (2026, September 28). Trump to meet with AI leaders; Bill Gates lays out stark warning about the tech's power [Interview transcript]. CBS News. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2949402/
MLA
Bill Gates. "Trump to meet with AI leaders; Bill Gates lays out stark warning about the tech's power." CBS News, 28 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2949402/.
BibTeX
@misc{gates2026_2949402,
author = {Bill Gates},
title = {Trump to meet with AI leaders; Bill Gates lays out stark warning about the tech's power},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CBS News. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2949402/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
