Bill Gates is warning that artificial intelligence could unleash mass unemployment, enable bioterrorism and even slip beyond human control — while accusing the tech industry of downplaying the dangers because too much money is at stake.
The 70-year-old tech titan sounded an equally dire warning in a nearly 6,000-word essay published on his personal website.
“Many jobs will disappear forever,” Gates wrote.
He said AI will rapidly take on work in law, customer service, medicine, software and manufacturing — and predicted that while some new positions will be created, “without the right policies, there will be far fewer than exist today.”
Gates even invoked the Great Depression, when unemployment in the US reached roughly 25% in 1933, while stopping short of predicting AI-driven joblessness would hit that level.
“AI may not reach this level, but its impact will not go away with an economic cycle,” Gates wrote.
Unlike earlier technological shifts, Gates argued, AI can replace human cognition itself — leaving fewer industries available to absorb workers displaced elsewhere.
The biggest labor shock will come when AI can perform nearly error-free work without a human checking it, he wrote.
At that point, companies will have every economic incentive to hand more work to machines, he said.
“How will an economy that’s been built around employment operate if fewer people are working, or if many people are working fewer hours?” Gates wrote.
Entry- and mid-level jobs face the most immediate threat, according to Gates.
Gates predicted that increasingly capable “smart” robots will begin competing with humans on some physical tasks in construction and hospitality by the end of the decade.
That could ignite an automation arms race in which companies that replace workers cut their prices, pressuring rivals to do the same.
“Market forces will make adoption go faster and faster and, unless we intervene, there will be fewer good jobs available and the benefits will accrue to a small group,” Gates wrote.
The Microsoft co-founder said mass job loss is inevitable without intervention as AI — which he called “the most dangerous tool ever invented” — spreads across the economy.
The coming upheaval is “utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different” from previous technological revolutions, Gates told the New York Times in an article published Wednesday.
Gates said he is “staking everything I know” on his belief that AI will break with centuries of technological progress by destroying jobs without creating enough new ones to replace them.
He told the Times that recent advances have stunned him, particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Coding is the field Gates said he knows best, making the software’s abilities especially jarring.
“The idea that now these things are in a meaningful sense better than I am is like: What the hell?” Gates told the Times.
Gates also accused the technology industry of privately recognizing how serious the dangers are while publicly soft-pedaling them — in spite of occasional dire warnings from the likes of Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
“In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it’s getting, they’re very worried,” Gates told the Times.
He said tech executives discourage one another from sounding the alarm because of the vast sums of money pouring into AI.
“They’re now saying to each other: ‘Hey, man, don’t say that. It’s bad for us — the next trillion dollars we’re trying to raise’,” Gates told the newspaper.
The dangers Gates sees extend far beyond jobs.
He warned in his essay that AI could dramatically lower the expertise and resources needed to carry out cyberattacks, fraud and other crimes — and make it easier to design a deadly new disease.
AI could also make hospitals, financial institutions, water systems, power grids and government-benefit systems easier to attack, he wrote.
Gates told the Times he supports mandatory reviews of AI systems capable of being weaponized to create new molecules and potentially unleash a pandemic.
“Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented?” Gates told the Times. “No, thanks!”
In the Times interview, Gates acknowledged that his past dealings with late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have damaged his standing, calling them “mistakes” of his own making as he tries to return to public life.
He said he believes that after answering questions for six hours before the House Oversight Committee in June, “people understand what I did do, what I didn’t do and that I learn when I make mistakes.”
Gates’ relationship with Epstein became a flashpoint in his marriage to Melinda French Gates, who said in 2022 that she “did not like” her then-husband’s meetings with Epstein. The divorce followed a broader collapse of trust rather than any single incident, according to Gates.
He has acknowledged an extramarital affair during the marriage and repeatedly called meeting Epstein a serious mistake.
More recently, he told congressional investigators that Epstein knew about three affairs and unsuccessfully tried to use that information to pressure him into renewing their relationship, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Gates has denied criminal involvement with Epstein, and an outside review commissioned by the Gates Foundation found interactions with Epstein between 2011 and 2014 but no evidence that the foundation paid him or participated in his crimes.