Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and, through the Gates Foundation, one of the largest private funders of global health and development. He entered the AI-governance debate as an author in his own right in August 2026 with a memo on GatesNotes arguing that the pace of AI advance has outrun the institutions meant to govern it.
The 2026 memo
Gates published the memo on August 26, 2026 under the headline "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical." and the standfirst "We need a plan to ensure that the good outweighs the bad." Coverage of it circulated under the URL slug "a turbulent AI era and critical choices to make." He writes that "AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice." The memo predicts disruption across law, customer service, medicine, software and manufacturing, and argues that without intervention there will be "far fewer" jobs than today. Its historical claim is that earlier technological transitions unfolded over generations and produced new work requiring human cognition, and that AI can now substitute for that cognition (Source: axios.com).
The memo's institutional proposals fall into two tiers. Domestically, Gates calls for a system coordinating AI priorities across government agencies rather than dividing the problem into what he calls bureaucratic fiefdoms, spanning national security, employment, education, taxation and health. Internationally, he proposes an organization drawing on three existing models — the nuclear-weapons inspections regime, international aviation regulation, and the agreements protecting the ozone layer — and states that "some cooperation between the U.S. and China will be required." He argues the framework will take years to build, which is his reason for starting now (The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. (Bill Gates, August 2026); axios.com).
Two distributive proposals accompany them. Gates proposes rebalancing taxation from labor toward AI tokens and robots, on the argument that displaced workers will pay less in income tax at the moment demand for social-safety-net spending is highest. He also proposes a domain he calls "Human Reserved" — occupations set aside for people even where machines could perform them — which he likens to nature reserves, places where building is possible but the loss would be too great. The memo grounds the idea in the paid caregivers who looked after his father in the later stages of Alzheimer's disease, and gives as examples elder care and the delivery of a terminal diagnosis, while noting that the boundary will vary by country: Japan, with a shrinking workforce, "may welcome a caregiving robot" where others would insist on human carers. Gates states the unresolved questions himself — who decides what is reserved, on what criteria, how companies are kept from using robots anyway, and what happens to international trade when one country permits robot production and another does not (The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. (Bill Gates, August 2026)). Axios's account of the proposal names child care and jury service as candidate occupations; neither example appears in the memo text (Source: axios.com).
In an accompanying interview Gates said that "on the current course and speed, there's a very high chance of a net negative outcome," that risks in cybersecurity, biology, human relationships and AI control are "all like flashing either yellow or red," and that "neither party is very knowledgeable or being thoughtful about this." He wrote that he would likely support a credible plan for slowing AI advances globally but does not expect one to emerge (Source: axios.com).
The memo runs to eight sections, of which three carry the proposals: "Build a new system for managing the transition", "Set aside some jobs for humans", and "Rebalance how we tax labor and capital" (The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. (Bill Gates, August 2026)).
Gates argues in the memo against leaving the response to AI developers: "It is great that some AI companies are proposing solutions to challenges raised by their own technology, but we should not expect them to lead the charge. Some of the issues are outside their area of expertise, and in a democratic society it's not their role to decide these things." He assigns religious leaders a role in the debate and cites Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by name as laying "a strong foundation for the work that needs to be done" (Magnifica Humanitas — Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV (15 May 2026)). The memo's three named risks are permanent job loss, the empowerment of bad actors alongside an eventual possibility that models "begin to act against our interests and we could lose control," and harm to children's development from AI companions, on which he cites a Stanford and Carnegie Mellon study of more than 1,100 companion users and quotes Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation (The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. (Bill Gates, August 2026)).
Statements on catastrophic risk
In an interview for NBC's "Meet the Press" scheduled to air on September 27, 2026, excerpts of which NBC released on September 25, Gates said that "AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths," and that "there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools." He said government and political parties need to work together now to keep AI from spiraling out of control (Source: axios.com). The remarks extend the risk the August memo groups as the empowerment of bad actors and eventual loss of control. See AI Existential Risk.
Relationships
- related: AI Labor Disruption — the memo's central claim concerns employment displacement and its distributive remedies.
- related: Frontier AI Governance, AI Governance (umbrella) — the two institutional tiers proposed.
- related: Microsoft — the company he co-founded.
- related: The Turbulent AI Era Is Here. The Choices We Make Now Are Critical. (Bill Gates, August 2026) — the memo itself.
- related: AI Public Wealth Fund and Government Equity in AI — a peer proposal for distributing AI gains, against which the token-and-robot tax sits.