{"id":46653,"date":"2026-09-28T10:50:31","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T08:50:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/?post_type=news&p=46653"},"modified":"2026-09-28T10:57:36","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T08:57:36","slug":"gates-joins-calls-for-ai-safeguards-including-legislation","status":"publish","type":"news","link":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/news\/gates-joins-calls-for-ai-safeguards-including-legislation\/","title":{"rendered":"Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, including legislation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Artificial Intelligence (AI) requires safeguards that go beyond self-regulation, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in an interview that aired on Sunday, calling for legislation to be passed in Congress.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cYou need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,\u201d Gates said in a taped interview on\u00a0NBC<\/i>\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press\u201d program. \u201cAnd that has to be a required thing.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
A sudden \u200bgroundswell has risen in favor of federal intervention after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control. Gates joined that chorus, saying that government must be involved.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cNo one thinks self-regulation is enough,\u201d he said.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
In a rare show of unity, \u200cthe Chief Executive Officer’s (CEO) of rivals Anthropic, OpenAI, Google\u2019s DeepMind, Microsoft and LAI have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
But United States (US) President Donald Trump and other opponents of additional regulation for AI say new government restrictions would simply give China the upper hand in the AI revolution. Trump has publicly dismissed calls for new laws on AI as a \u201choax.\u201d<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a hoax at all,\u201d he told NBC.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Gates has said he wants to meet Trump to discuss AI.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\u201cI hope that, given my life\u2019s work in the field, my saying how unique and different this is and how concerned I am will add to what he\u2019s hearing from other people,\u201d Gates said.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Axios reported that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei will have dinner on Sunday with Trump at the White House. Anthropic and the White House did not immediately return a request for comment on the Axios report.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Warnings about AI\u2019s risks are not new. But they took on added urgency this month after researchers in leading AI labs attached both a timeline and a probability to those concerns.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI \u200bcould kill us all by the end of the decade, prompting US lawmakers to call for new rules to govern the technology. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic\u2019s alignment science lead, echoed Coxon\u2019s warning, saying there was a more than 10% chance of such an event within the next decade.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Some policymakers have proposed mandating a \u201ckill switch\u201d that would allow federal authorities to halt AI models. Gates said that while he was not opposed to some sort of kill switch, it would not be enough if other safeguards were not also implemented.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
The US and China agreed to launch a dialogue on AI following President Xi Jinping\u2019s recent visit to Washington.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
–Reuters-<\/div>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":11831,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"news-type":[26],"class_list":["post-46653","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.","published_date":"","news_description":"Gates argued that safeguards would not dramatically hinder the industry, and that the risks of not implementing them are real.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/46653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/46653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46654,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/46653\/revisions\/46654"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=46653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}