Bill Gates calls for legally required AI safeguards
On 27 September 2026 Bill Gates told NBC’s Meet the Press that AI safeguards must be legally required, with law enforcement and politicians in the work and the rules mandatory. He rejected self-regulation and President Trump’s dismissal of fears of AI catastrophe as a hoax.
Why it mattered He called for binding rules on 27 September, two days before the White House signed its voluntary super-intelligence accord.
Bill Gates appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on 27 September 2026 and said AI safeguards must be legally required rather than voluntary. “You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” he said, according to Reuters. “And that has to be a required thing.”
Gates said industry self-regulation is not enough. “No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he said. He added that a kill switch alone would not be enough without wider safeguards, and that regulators need insight into and records of what is being done with AI.
He warned that AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths,” framing the danger as misuse by bad actors rather than autonomous systems, the Guardian reported. He said safeguards would add “a little bit of overhead for the industry, but not a dramatic slowing of what they’re doing.”
Gates rejected President Donald Trump’s dismissal of fears of AI catastrophe as a “hoax.” “It’s not a hoax at all,” he said. Reuters reported that Trump has publicly dismissed fears of an AI catastrophe as a hoax, arguing restrictions would hand China an advantage in AI.