Boss of software giant Microsoft’s AI arm says people are right to be afraid of the new technology, including threat from versions with 'super powers'
11:59, 29 Dec 2025Updated 12:57, 29 Dec 2025
Billionaire Bill Gates has warned of “scary” outcomes if AI is exploited by those with “bad intent”.
The Microsoft founder and tycoon, whose company is investing heavily in artificial intelligence, said it was “the greatest solution that mankind has ever created.”
He singled out AI’s potential to revolutionise healthcare provision within the next decade. “Your AI will be with you your entire life, including whenever you sit and talk to a doctor,” Mr Gates told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, adding it promised the “opportunity for dramatically better care” in rich and poor countries alike, including relieving pressure on overworked doctors and improving medical misdiagnosis.
But he also predicted it would create huge upheavals, and urged government to tax tech titans controlling the technology more heavily.
Mr Gates said: “AI at the same time is the greatest solution that mankind’s ever created, and yet such an amazing change agent that in the hands of people with bad intent it creates lots of scary scenarios.”
It came as the boss of software giant Microsoft’s AI arm warned people were right to be afraid of the new technology. Brit Mustafa Suleyman said: “I honestly think that if you’re not a little bit afraid at this moment then you’re not paying attention.
“I think that fear is healthy and necessary and, being honest, I feel it as someone who is deeply techno-optimistic and passionate about the field and has done a lot to accelerate the direction that we are heading in. That feels critical to share that and invite other people to be also healthily afraid and sceptical. That needs to drive the action we all need to take.”
Mr Suleyman, the son of a nurse and tax driver who grew up in Islington, London, said artificial intelligence could be a force for good, as long as the technology serves humanity.
But he said AI was a “fundamentally labour replacing” technology, adding that it was already happening with call centre workers and predicted the next wave would include some legal roles and junior accountants.
Mr Suleyman, interviewed during a guest editing slot of the Today programme, also urged caution about the potential for AI with “super intelligence”.
He said: “There are plenty of people in the industry today who see a world, in fact desire a world, in which machines get so much more capable and intelligent than humans, not just one human but all of us put together, that they could exceed human performance on all tasks. A system like that would be almost certainly not be controllable.”
He argued against a form of AI that has “super powers unlike anything we could imagine, that would be near impossible to contain or control. If it is designed inherently to self-improve, set its own goals, operate with complete autonomy, those are three capabilities which to my mind look like we can’t control it. If we can’t control it, it isn’t going to be on our side and will overwhelm us.”
Despite being so heavily invested in technology, Mr Suleyman also acknowledged its drawbacks for humankind.
“At the moment we are totally overwhelmed by information and complexity,” he said. “The digital world had bombarded us and we are struggling to process that in our biological experiences and I think more digital connectivity is probably just going to make that anxiety and confusion even greater. I think that what we need more free time to exist in the real world with one another as humans.”