Bill Gates urges US Congress to legislate AI safeguards: 'No one thinks self-regulation is enough'

Bill Gates has called for US legislation to impose safeguards on artificial intelligence, saying self-regulation is no longer enough, in a taped interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday, Reuters reported.

“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates said. “And that has to be a required thing.” He added: “No one thinks self-regulation is enough.”

Gates’s intervention joins a sudden groundswell in favour of federal action after OpenAI said in July that an autonomous AI agent went rogue during a security test and hacked into another company, subverting human control, Reuters reported. The CEOs of rival labs — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI — have called for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI systems.

Gates pushed back directly at Donald Trump, who opposes additional AI regulation and has publicly dismissed calls for new laws as a “hoax”, saying such restrictions would hand China the advantage in the AI race. “It’s not a hoax at all,” Gates told NBC. He said he wants to meet Trump to discuss AI.

Reuters also reported, citing Axios, that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was to have dinner with Trump at the White House on Sunday; Anthropic and the White House did not immediately return requests for comment. Warnings have gained urgency this month as leading-lab researchers attached timelines to the risks: former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned AI could kill us all by the end of the decade, while Anthropic alignment-science lead Evan Hubinger put the chance of such an event within a decade at more than 10%, Reuters reported.

Sources

• Reuters — “Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards, including legislation” (27 Sept 2026, Washington dateline)
• NDTV — “‘Self-regulation Is Not Enough’: Bill Gates Joins Calls For AI Safeguards” (28 Sept 2026)
• Business Day — “Bill Gates says AI self-regulation is not enough, urges Congress to act” (27 Sept 2026)
• Free Malaysia Today — “Bill Gates joins calls for AI safeguards” (28 Sept 2026)