FT Tech Tonic Bill Gates: AI bioweapons ‘could be worse than Covid’
9 snips
Nov 4, 2026 
Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, technology investor and global health philanthropist, discusses AI’s darker future. He explores cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, bioweapons potentially worse than Covid, and why governments must regulate frontier models. Gates also considers mass white-collar job displacement, AI’s promise for healthcare and farming, and how taxation and philanthropy could tackle rising inequality.
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AI Coding Has Crossed A Dangerous Threshold
- AI coding has crossed from assistance into outperforming humans, creating both productivity gains and new security dangers.
- Bill Gates says upcoming model releases will improve rapidly, expanding benefits and harms simultaneously.
AI Is More Than Another Technology Wave
- Society underestimates AI because human-level and superhuman intelligence are difficult to imagine.
- Gates compares the shift to evolution from monkeys to humans, not to earlier tools like PCs or the internet.
Open Models Could Supercharge Cyberattacks
- AI could expose weaknesses across hospitals, banks, power networks, and other digitized infrastructure.
- Open-weight models without safeguards may enable ransomware attacks before organizations can replace vulnerable software.