Bill Gates, shown here in April 2025, released a memo this week warning that the world isn’t ready for AI. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Bill Gates published a new essay warning that the AI industry is crossing the safety lines it set for itself, and that nobody is preparing for what’s coming. At age 70, he also uses AI more than most people half his age, and he finds it enthralling, as you’ll hear on this week’s show, with highlights from our interview with him.
Along the way, we dig into his three proposals: new institutions for managing the transition, a category of jobs reserved for humans, and a tax on the use and purchase of AI and robots.
The change in his own tech usage: “I joke with people that I used to have Claude-like people that I would send email to, but they were so slow, and there were some topics they didn’t actually know. … It’s three a.m. I want to understand sodium batteries, and now there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go. Yeah, it’s crazy.”
How he uses AI specifically: “If you’re a curious person, this is a mind-blowing time. When I’m working on malaria, nutrition, my poor humans that I work with always get these long conversations from me, where I paste in — me, Claude, me, ChatGPT. Sometimes I do it if there’s three of us: Claude, ChatGPT and me, debating these things.”
On where personal agents are headed: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t. … You won’t go to those applications. You’ll just go to your personal agent. … From a productivity point of view, we are in heaven.”
What has surprised him: “I was shocked by ChatGPT, and I was shocked by Claude Code. Those are both things where I went, oh my God. … I did not expect that a statistical machine would essentially learn to read, and the idea that the code is better than human code. Those are two stunning thresholds.”
On writing this essay: “It’s very unnatural for me to think that innovation may be a net negative if it’s not managed properly. The more I wrote the memo, the more I was like, Jesus, we really need to get our act together here. Even though this may come across as negative, that’s the truth. If we don’t step up, the negatives will substantially outweigh the positives.”
What AI leaders say privately: “You’re in this perverse period right now where people in the AI industry who are willing to say that AI might have some negative effects are told, ‘Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.’ … I know they’re all worried. Or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”
On losing control of AI: “The wake-up for the memo is that the bad stuff thresholds are all being crossed. Even lack of control that I thought would be many years from now, we’re seeing lack of control. … These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things. What kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”
On how fast robots are coming: “What’s weird about AI is it’s better at doing jobs across the entire economy, including physical jobs when the robots come — which you can guess when that is, but my view is it’s only a couple of years.”
Is he still an optimist? “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful. I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything. So it’s kind of bizarre if a guy who’s 70 comes and writes a memo that’s actually helpful. … But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”
Bill Gates at the keyboard in a 2018 file photo. (Gates Notes Photo)
Bill Gates is legendary, bordering on notorious, for his late-night emails — missives to colleagues with piercing questions about Java back in the day, or malaria these days, or whatever esoteric topic he happens to seize upon at any given moment.
But increasingly, he is sending these messages to AI, not to people. He’ll bounce something off Claude, get ChatGPT to weigh in, and insert himself in the middle.
He described the pattern in an interview with GeekWire: “It’s 3 a.m., I want to understand sodium batteries. Now, there’s no reason to go to sleep. Here we go! Yeah, it’s crazy.”
If you’re a curious person, he said, “this is a mind-blowing time.”
In terms of productivity, he added, “we are in heaven.”
All of which might be predictable. This is Bill Gates, after all. Now 70 years old, he has spent more than five decades impatient for the future to arrive — making the case that innovation, on the whole, will ultimately put humanity and the world in a better place.
So here’s the surprise twist: He’s now deeply concerned about where technology is headed, how fast it’s progressing, and how little the world is doing to get ready.
In a new essay, Gates says the “turbulent AI era” has arrived, with technology threatening to erase categories of jobs, supercharge fraud and deepfakes, lower the bar for cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, make it easier to engineer a deadly new disease, let governments kill without humans involved in the decision, and fundamentally change how kids grow up.
If someone came up with a credible plan to slow the pace of AI globally, he writes, he’d likely support it. But he doesn’t expect one. The geopolitical and economic forces are too much.
He says that the world needs to take action, and offers three ideas to start:
Build new institutions, at home and globally. No existing agency was designed for a technology that touches jobs, security, health, energy and elections all at once, he writes.
Gates calls for new national bodies that can set priorities across agencies, plus a new international organization modeled on nuclear weapons inspections, aviation rules and the ozone treaties.
Set aside jobs for humans. Gates calls this “Human Reserved”: work that machines will be fully capable of doing, but that we decide to keep for people anyway. The model is a nature reserve — land where we could build roads and buildings, but choose not to, because the loss would be too great.
One example: a robot delivering the news that you have an incurable disease. “There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t,” he writes. “Yet it shouldn’t.”
The idea came in part from watching the caregivers who looked after his father through Alzheimer’s, work he describes as “irreplaceably human.”
Tax AI tokens and robots. Today a company that hires a worker pays payroll taxes, while a company that buys a robot deducts the cost. Gates says that gives employers a reason to replace people. He’s calling for a tax on AI to change the incentives and help pay for retraining.
He first floated a robot tax nine years ago, but the idea was widely dismissed. He’s still for it. He acknowledges that it isn’t economically efficient, but says that with innovation accelerating, we can afford a little inefficiency as the price of keeping people employed.
Gates is candid that he doesn’t have all the answers, particularly on the proposal for “Human Reserved” jobs. Who decides what gets reserved, and by what criteria? How do you keep companies from using robots in the jobs that are supposed to stay human?
These, he writes, “will need to be worked out in public.”
In the meantime, he’s working it out with Claude. Gates said he has talked the idea through with the chatbot, thinking through different ways to get the share of work reserved for humans up to 40%, using shorter workdays and earlier retirement to spread what’s left around.
Crossing the threshold
In the GeekWire interview, Gates said the essay came out of a specific realization: the AI industry is blowing past its own warning signs, one after another, and almost nobody is saying so out loud.
For years, he said, people in AI described certain moments as dangerous points where the industry would stop and think hard before going further: making it easier to build a bioweapon, making it easier to launch a cyberattack, building machines people become emotionally dependent on, wiping out large numbers of jobs, and losing control of the technology itself.
“We’re in the process of crossing every single one of those thresholds,” he said.
Meanwhile, nobody in the industry wants to be first to step on the brakes. “Most people you talk to will say, yeah, well, if everybody else would slow down, maybe I would, too,” he said.
Gates said one way out of that standoff is for governments to step in.
His example: any AI model capable of designing new molecules — the capability that would let someone engineer a new disease — should be monitored. The monitoring would be mandatory rather than voluntary, and it would cover free models as well as commercial ones. It would also have to be written so a company can’t copy the model elsewhere and strip the monitoring out.
“To me, that’s kind of like common sense,” he said. “But we don’t see a specific proposal to do that.”
‘The whole thing seems so empty to me’
Under an executive order signed by President Trump in June, AI companies are asked to submit their most powerful models for government testing up to 30 days before release. The order specifically bars the program from becoming a licensing or preclearance requirement. The White House finalized the framework in early August.
Gates said he doesn’t get it.
“What is the threshold that’s being examined, and what is the action taken when you cross that threshold?” he said. “The whole thing seems so empty to me.”
If the world can’t take these basic steps, he said, “I really am going to throw up my hands.”
If the process stays voluntary, with no line and no consequence for crossing it, “we’re going to look back on this as a kind of eye-of-the-storm type moment,” he said.
Asked if he had taken his proposals to the Trump administration or to other heads of state, Gates said with a bemused tone, “Well, you could tell me who at the White House I should be talking to about this.” He said he hopes the essay reaches people in Congress and in the executive branch.
He said the public argument among AI companies over whether the risks are real is beside the point, because privately the people running them already agree. “I know they’re all worried,” he said, “or all of them that I know, which is basically everybody but Elon.”
People inside AI companies who acknowledge the downsides, Gates said, get told: “Hey, you’re hurting our PR while we’re trying to raise trillions of dollars.”
Gates said he previously expected losing control of AI to be a distant problem, something to worry about “many years from now.” He’s no longer convinced that’s the case.
He referenced an Aug. 11 episode of the Dwarkesh Patel podcast featuring Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at the AI safety group Redwood Research. Greenblatt said that as AI systems get more capable, the people building them understand less and less about what is happening inside, and that sufficiently advanced models could end up working against their creators.
“These are people who are super expert on the thing, going, well, maybe we won’t be able to control these things,” Gates said. “I mean, what kind of risk have we chosen to run here?”
In the poorest countries, he expects AI to do more good than harm. In the countries where the Gates Foundation works, doctors, teachers and farm advisors are all in short supply. AI can help fill those gaps. The foundation will lay out that work at its Goalkeepers event next month, including an effort to make AI models work as well in African languages as they do in English.
The job losses, he added, will hit rich countries first.
It’s the first big wave of new attention on the Microsoft co-founder and Gates Foundation chair since he answered lawmakers’ questions in the Jeffrey Epstein investigation on June 10, sitting for a nearly six-hour voluntary interview with the House Oversight Committee.
Gates, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing, was asked by Axios whether he’s concerned that the Epstein issue could undercut his message. According to the site, he compared this to earlier situations when personal and professional challenges diminished his ability to speak out on key subjects: during the Microsoft antitrust trial, and his divorce from Melinda French Gates.
The AI Road Ahead
For all of this, Gates is still thinking about how technology will change human life and productivity, in many ways for the better on an individual level.
A key step, he said, will be establishing broad-based persistent memory for AI agents across contexts. For now, AI still doesn’t know you like a human assistant who’s familiar with your relationships and how you think about your time.
Gates sees the role of apps changing in the future. Instead of bouncing between different pieces of software, he said, AI will increasingly be the primary interface. “You won’t go to those applications,” he said. “You’ll just go to your personal agent.”
He also sees AI continuing to transform shopping, to an extreme: “We will get to a point where you won’t buy things yourself. You just won’t.” Telling the agent to help you buy something, “it’ll consider so many more things, and it’ll make it so much easier for you to do it.”
Asked whether he is still an optimist, Gates didn’t answer directly. “I don’t think being pessimistic is helpful,” he said.
“I do think, wow, this is sure an interesting time. I’m the guy who in my 30s thought people in their 50s or 60s didn’t understand anything.” He called it “kind of bizarre” that he would be delivering a message like this at 70.
“But I am very concerned. And honestly, when you get people one-on-one, so are they.”
Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME’s director, is principal investigator on the grant. He started the Global Burden of Disease study in the early 1990s. (IHME Photo)
The Gates Foundation broke its own record at the University of Washington with the largest charitable gift in university history: $540.2 million for the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The commitment, announced Monday, will fund a 10-year expansion of IHME’s Global Burden of Disease study, increasing the number of locations it covers from about 925 to nearly 5,000. For many countries, the study is the only source of comparable data on causes of death and disease, according to IHME.
It will also support the institute’s health forecasting and its tracking of health spending worldwide.
The funding “will allow us to provide high-quality evidence at a much more local level and help leaders understand not only where health is improving or worsening, but which decisions can make the greatest difference for people,” said Dr. Christopher Murray, IHME’s director and a professor of health metrics sciences at UW, in a statement announcing the grant.
Roughly 60% of IHME’s budget comes from the Gates Foundation, according to the institute. The rest comes from federal grants, projects with other countries and other philanthropies.
IHME describes the new commitment from the Gates Foundation as a core grant that keeps the institute at a “steady state.” The previous core grant, $279 million announced in 2017, ramps down in December, and the new one begins in January.
IHME employed 425 people in fiscal 2026, down from 469 the year before, the institute said. No significant additional hiring is planned.
The institute became widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its projections of cases, hospitalizations and deaths were used by the White House coronavirus task force and cited around the world. It drew criticism from statisticians who said its early forecasts understated the U.S. death toll and that its uncertainty ranges were too narrow, prompting revisions by IHME.
The Gates Foundation helped create IHME at UW in 2007 with a $105 million grant, then the largest in UW history. It has repeatedly set UW’s donation record since then, including $210 million in 2016 for the building that now houses the institute and $279 million to IHME in 2017.
The latest grant comes as global health funding falls sharply. IHME’s own tracking found that development assistance for health dropped 21% between 2024 and 2025, driven by a 67% decline in U.S. spending. Britain, France and Germany also cut their contributions.
It also comes at a tough moment for UW, which is facing a budget crisis driven by funding cuts. KUOW reported in April that NIH award money promised to UW dropped 50% from fiscal 2025 to fiscal 2026, with funds in hand down 74% because of slow federal grant processing.
The foundation is going through a transition of its own. It announced in May 2025 that it would spend $200 billion over 20 years and close on Dec. 31, 2045. Its board approved a record $9 billion budget for 2026 and a plan to cut up to 500 of its roughly 2,375 staff positions by 2030.
The new grant will run into 2036, about a decade before the foundation closes.
Updated after publication with additional information from IHME.
— Teri Hatfield was named chief revenue officer for Iterable, a customer engagement platform. The Seattle-area tech executive most recently served as executive vice president of sales and solutions at Salesforce and CRO of Tableau, which Salesforce acquired in 2019. She joined Tableau in 2012 and spent more than a decade in sales leadership roles at Verizon earlier in her career.
“I’ve come to believe that great customer relationships don’t start with technology. They start with understanding your customers,” Hatfield said on LinkedIn. “Iterable stood out because it’s built around that belief.”
Hatfield will work remotely for Iterable, which is based in San Francisco.
Ken Miller. (Arnold & Porter Photo)
— Seattle-area attorney Ken Miller has joined Arnold & Porter as a partner in the life sciences and technology transactions teams within the law firm’s corporate and finance group.
Miller began his legal career at Perkins Coie, where he spent 16 years focused on tech companies and nonprofit organizations.
In 2015, he moved to the Gates Foundation as associate general counsel, briefly serving as lead counsel for the Gates Medical Research Institute before returning to the foundation as director of legal. In that role, he led work tied to the Global Health Division, the research institute, and business development and licensing, privacy and AI.
Ben Reed. (LinkedIn Photo)
— Ben Reed is now chief marketing officer for AIM Intelligent Machines (AIM), a Seattle-area startup developing software that lets bulldozers and excavators operate on their own.
Reed previously ran a firm offering AI marketing and go-to-market advisory services. Other past roles include CMO for Sanctuary AI and a decade at Microsoft, where he departed as head of strategic storytelling for the company’s digital transformation platform.
“I’ve spent much of my career helping frontier technologies become understandable, credible, and consequential, from Microsoft Surface and HoloLens to physical AI, humanoids, and robotics. At AIM, the unusual opportunity is that the technology, customers, deployments, and proof already exist,” Reed said on LinkedIn.
Philip Wong. (Gravitics Photo)
— Aerospace startup Gravitics named Philip Wong chief financial officer. The Marysville, Wash.-based company designs and manufactures modular space infrastructure such as commercial space station modules, cargo-carrying spacecraft and orbital carriers. Its customers include U.S. Space Force and Axiom Space. On Tuesday, Gravitics announced a partnership with Lockheed Martin on a Department of War contract.
Wong joins Gravitics from Viasat, a communications company providing satellite internet services, where he led financial strategy and investment planning. He previously held leadership roles at Pure Storage and Seagate Technology and is based in California.
“Philip has spent 30 years deploying capital across satellite, network, and space infrastructure … He knows how to translate real engineering programs into the financial strategy that supports them,” said Colin Doughan, co-founder and CEO of Gravitics, in a statement.
— Ian Fliflet, former chief growth officer at Seattle online sales platform OfferUp, is sharing his insights on Intro, a service that provides video chats with experts from wide-ranging backgrounds.
— Katy Brown, president of Microsoft’s Americas Markets & Industries organization, was named to Avanade’s board of directors. Brown has been with the tech giant for nearly 30 years and is past president and board chair of the Professional Businesswomen of California. She also serves as executive sponsor of the Bay Area Women at Microsoft group.
— Ben Minicucci, CEO and president of Alaska Air Group, has joinedLyft’s board of directors. Minicucci has spent more than two decades with the airline, which is the parent company of Alaska Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines and Horizon Air.
— Seattle tech leader Ash Wahiwas appointed to MoPOP’s board of directors. Wahi is the founder and CEO of Revenaut, a startup building an AI marketing tool. His career includes leadership roles in product and advertising at Microsoft, Snap and Meta.
— TiE Seattle, a nonprofit supporting entrepreneurship, named five new members to its board of directors:
Joseph Sirosh, CEO of CreatorsAG and former executive at Amazon and Microsoft. He also serves on the board for the biotech company AbSci.
Monika Panpaliya, partner director of product management at Microsoft and former leader at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Boeing and T-Mobile.
Vamshi Reddy, CEO of Quadrant Technologies, founder of Seattle Venture Capital, and past leader at Lenora Systems and Microsoft.
Prasad Anguluri, co-founder of the social media platform Haply, which connects neighbors. Anguluri also serves as a Bothell City Council member, president of ANG Technologies, and co-founder of Innovative Investing Group.
Sanjay Puri, who was previously a vice president with Icertis and a former leader at Avalara, 9Mile Labs, Edifecs and others.
— JT McCrone, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center genomic epidemiologist, was named leader of Nextstrain, an open-source project that tracks the evolution and spread of viral and bacterial pathogens in real time.
The effort is primarily based in Seattle at Fred Hutch and two institutions in Basel, Switzerland. It has received $1.5 million from the Gates Foundation to support its next phase, which aims to make analyses of viral evolution more accessible and scalable.
— Graham Littlehaleis now an investing partner with venture firm Felicis. He previously served as vice president of Point72 Ventures.
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