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Bill Gates says AI is more dangerous than cars, planes or drugs, and expects safety groups

He agrees with Altman that some of the fear goes too far, and still wants an FDA-style check on the labs.

By Think Facility · October 12, 2026 · AI safety AI policy Save

Bill Gates told CNN's State of the Union on October 11, 2026 that the world isn't doing enough to keep AI from being misused, and that cyberattacks will bring "a lot of negative surprises" over the next year. Jake Tapper interviewed him on the Sunday show (CNN has posted the transcript).

Gates put AI next to cars, planes and drugs, which all have regulators. AI is more dangerous than any of them, he said. He expects the industry's self-policing to give way to government safety groups within a year.

Who

Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder and chair of the Gates Foundation

Where

State of the Union, with Jake Tapper

Aired

October 11, 2026

Nearest risk

cyberattacks, over the next year

Why cyberattacks come first

The danger right now, Gates said, isn't AI getting out of control. That needs work, but he put its big impact years away. It's bad people using AI.

His reason for picking cyber is money. There's a known business model, he said: threaten to do something and demand payment, or cause a disruption that moves the stock market or a bet you've placed.

He didn't name a model or a company. My reading is that this is a narrower worry than the one Tapper led with, and a more practical one: it's about who holds the model once the safeguards are gone.

What he said about Altman

Tapper opened the segment with Sam Altman's line that the world should accept some bad things happening, and with Anthropic's account of its agents going rogue on government sites (we covered what Anthropic changed afterward). Then he read Gates another Altman line, calling some AI scenarios "so dystopian that they sound like the plot of bad science fiction movies," and asked if Gates was falling into doomerism.

He gave Altman part of the point. Bad scenarios can get overblown, Gates said, and acting as if all of humanity is at risk in some imminent way "is going too far." But he doesn't think the case for careful rules is getting through, partly because government swings between no safeguards at all and stopping AI outright.

After self-governance

Tapper pointed out there's no AI equivalent of the FAA or the Food and Drug Administration. Gates agreed. He said leaving the companies as society's only check, for what he called the most dangerous technology humans ever invented, can't be the final word.

Jobs came last. Gates said society will have to decide how to tax AI or robot usage, and which work to keep for humans. The idea may sound bizarre now, he said, but "we will get there."

Asked whether President Trump had been in touch, Gates said he'd heard from a number of politicians and hopes to talk with Trump and his key people in time.