Bill Gates has moved on from warning that climate change could spell the end of humanity, to everyone’s new favorite harbinger of the apocalypse: artificial intelligence.

In a Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” the Microsoft co-founder was asked whether AI could bring about humanity’s demise. Gates took care in choosing his words before conceding that the technology is powerful enough to cause billions of deaths, a possibility that is, unfortunately, no longer entirely fantastical.

But rather than dwelling on the familiar AI-doomsday narrative, Gates appeared more concerned with people who could weaponize the technology for malicious ends. He went on to praise the combined efforts of tech founders and policymakers to get ahead of the problems it could create, because apparently waiting for the catastrophe to arrive would be poor planning.

Bill Gates on AI:

AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths.

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.

And it’s great that… pic.twitter.com/v0eQTMTKDU

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 27, 2026

“AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths,” Gates said. “So even though it’s pretty hard to get to 100 percent, there’s never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.”

“And it’s great that there’s this discussion with the industry, almost against their interest, admitting these things,” the Microsoft Founder added. The problem is that the rest of the world is either discounting this or just thinking of this as a competition. And it’s very scary that we don’t have all of the thinkers saying, how do we want to shape this?”

While AI could certainly become a weapon of mass destruction in the wrong hands, critics are overlooking a basic reality: the same technology can be used to counter itself. Much as conservatives argue that the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, the same principle largely applies to artificial intelligence. But by casting government as the “good guy” with AI, policymakers may be handing an advantage to those with malicious intent, people who are not exactly burdened by the processes, paperwork, and general molasses-like pace of the American government.

The solution, believe it or not, lies in the competition of a genuinely free market. AI can be deployed preemptively to identify, counter, and stop AI used by bad actors.

Consider cybersecurity, an especially relevant example amid the Hugging Face incident and the growing number of alleged cases involving AI breaches of corporate systems. What is the most practical response? Companies should develop their own defensive AI or work with firms building AI specifically to secure online systems. A human analyst probably cannot compete with AI’s speed or scale, so the answer is to give defenders technology capable of standing toe-to-toe with the dangerous version.

Restricting AI, particularly through government mandates, risks limiting its legitimate and defensive uses even more than its malicious ones. Those hell-bent on causing harm are not known for pausing to fill out compliance paperwork. Keep AI in the market, encourage the development of defensive systems, and give companies and individuals a genuine chance to get ahead of the threat.

Technology is a tool; its danger or value depends on the people using it. The AI debate too often treats the technology itself as the problem, rather than focusing on the people who would weaponize it and the people capable of stopping them.

The answer is not to regulate AI so heavily that defensive development falls behind malicious use. It is to encourage a competitive market for AI that can detect cyberattacks, prevent fraud, secure critical infrastructure, and counter harmful automation at machine speed. Bad actors will not wait for permission or comply with rules designed to slow them down. The people protecting everyone else should not be forced to wait, either.

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