Bill Gates sounds alarm over AI feature that could fuel wave of cyberattacks in the next year
Bill Gates has issued a new warning over the risks surrounding artificial intelligence as public fears continue to grow over the risks the technology poses.
The rapidly developing tech has been the subject of press in recent weeks due to cybersecurity breaches, and now Gates has warned that things might be about to get worse.
The Microsoft co-founder shared his beliefs that AI could end up being the cause of a wave of fresh cyberattacks over the next 12 months, with hackers potentially being able to use the tech to their advantage.
During an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Gates said: “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.”
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The mogul went on to share that money could be a major motivator for cyber criminals, with extortion schemes potentially being used with AI to manipulate things like betting results and the financial markets.
Bill Gates warns AI cyberattacks will increase
The mogul claimed that government leaders are ‘not doing enough’, adding: “The real danger right now is not the AI is getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that’s years away in terms of the big impact that might have.”
He continued: “The front that we’ll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyberattacks, because there, there’s a known business model where, you know, you threaten to do something and ask somebody to pay for that, or you create a disruption that changes something in the stock market or some betting thing that you go and do.”
This comes after other tech bosses have also raised the alarm over the dangers of AI, with even Antropic CEO Dario Amodei speaking out.
Amodei shared an essay where he warned that AI ‘swarms’ could take over the internet in as soon as six months if the industry fails to slow down.
This warning from the mogul was met with support from other figures in the industry, with Elon Musk writing on X: “Dario is right.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s Sam Altman added: “I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we’ve had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We’ll have more to share soon.”
Despite this, it seems like the advancements of AI are showing no signs of slowing down, leading to an increase in public calls for stronger guardrails to be put into place for the technology.