Bill Gates has warned that AI-powered cyberattacks will surge over the next year as criminals strip away safety guardrails.
The Microsoft co-founder, 69, said last week that the most dramatic threat humanity faces in the near term comes not from artificial intelligence itself running amok, but from malicious actors weaponizing existing systems. Gates stressed that while long-term fears about失控 AI dominate popular imagination, the immediate danger is far more human and far more present.
“The front that will probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyber attacks, because there there’s a known business model, where you threaten to do something and ask someone to pay you for that or you create a disruption that changes something in the stock market or some betting thing that you do and do,” Gates said in the interview. “And so 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.”
Gates continued, drilling down on how these attacks become possible. “It’s really bad people using AI, particularly an AI where you can take out all the safeguards,” he said. “So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and 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 billionaire philanthropist’s warning arrives as he has spent months framing the current period as one of extraordinary technological upheaval. In a recent Gates Notes essay titled “The turbulent AI era is here,” he identified three defining risks of the artificial intelligence age that extend beyond the cybersecurity threats he emphasized to CNN.
Job displacement sits first on that list. Gates has repeatedly flagged that AI is already eliminating positions and will continue reshaping labor markets across industries. The second risk involves precisely the criminal exploitation he detailed in his television appearance: deepfakes, fraud, and the broader category of harmful applications when powerful tools reach the wrong users. Third, Gates has raised alarms about developmental harm to children, citing potential damage to social skills, increased vulnerability to online manipulation, and diminished cognitive and academic growth.
The interview marked a sharpening of Gates’s public messaging around near-term AI dangers. Where his earlier commentary balanced optimism about AI’s potential against longer-term existential questions, his latest remarks pressed urgency about what he sees as an unfolding crisis in digital security. He noted that despite efforts by AI developers to embed protective limitations into their systems, determined adversaries can currently circumvent these controls.
“We’re not doing enough” to address rising AI-associated dangers, Gates said, a line he has used to push for accelerated regulatory frameworks and industry coordination.
The Microsoft co-founder’s warnings carry particular weight given his dual position as both a technology architect and one of its most prominent critics. Having helped build the modern computing ecosystem, Gates now occupies a rare role as insider-turned-skeptic, using his platform to press for what he terms an “urgent supervisory layer” over rapidly advancing capabilities.
Gates’s emphasis on criminal exploitation rather than autonomous AI threat represents a notable pivot in mainstream tech discourse. Where figures like Elon Musk have long warned of artificial general intelligence escaping human control, Gates has increasingly steered conversation toward present-day harms that require immediate policy and technical responses. His CNN appearance underscored this tactical repositioning, treating runaway AI as a genuine but distant concern while elevating cyberattacks as the pressing 2025 threat.
The interview also reflected Gates’s ongoing campaign to shape how governments and institutions prepare for AI’s societal impacts. Beyond cybersecurity, his three-risk framework has become a recurring structure in his public communications, suggesting a deliberate effort to establish accessible categories for policymakers and the public to grasp an otherwise unwieldy technological transformation.