Bill Gates has revealed that his most immediate concern with artificial intelligence is “bad people” using it for bioterrorism and cyber attacks
The co-founder of Microsoft claimed that there are currently no adequate safeguards to prevent powerful AI models from being used by malicious actors.
In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to disrupt financial systems, carry out sophisticated cyber attacks and develop never-before-seen bioweapons.
“The front that we’ll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyber attacks,” he said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.
“The real danger right now is not the AI’s getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that’s years away in terms of the big impact that might have.
“It’s really bad people using AI, particularly in AI where you can take out all the safeguards. Right now, you're allowed to take all those safeguards out. So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that's where, over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises.”
The warning came after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella urged tech companies to treat all AI models as if they are already “compromised” and potentially dangerous.
He urged AI researchers to build safeguards into the technology from the beginning of their development.
One such safety mechanism would be an “emergency brake” that allowed any authorised person to pause or shut down a model if it is acting in a way that does not align with human interests.
“We must build contained systems whose behavior we can observe, limits we can test, and actions we can always contain,” he wrote in a lengthy post to X over the weekend.
“Any sufficiently capable actor with access to important systems can make mistakes or be compromised, and the architecture of containment and control must account for that.”
There has been a sharp rise in AI-powered cyber attacks in 2026, with Anthropic, OpenAI and other leading labs reporting incidents that involved experimental models hacking into the computer systems of companies and governments.
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