Bill Gates urged the U.S. to lead on AI governance, warning that securing international agreement on rules for artificial intelligence could prove harder than Cold War–era nuclear negotiations. In an interview on Meet the Press, the Microsoft co-founder argued for real-time monitoring of frontier AI systems, saying safeguards need not slow innovation or disadvantage the U.S. against China. His remarks contrasted with President Donald Trump’s resistance to federal AI guardrails, even as Washington and Beijing established a channel to discuss AI risks. Gates’ comments follow calls by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman to temper the pace of frontier model development and to restrict recursively self-improving systems. Gates also backed congressional efforts to bolster emergency controls while cautioning that a “kill switch” alone is insufficient without internal logs and oversight. He highlighted Gates Foundation initiatives to improve AI reliability in non-English languages for health and education and briefly called his past interactions with Jeffrey Epstein “regrettable.”
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