TL;DR
Bill Gates is arranging a November meeting with Xi Jinping to argue for international restraint on AI, telling Reuters he thinks Beijing would accept limits on releasing dangerous models if Washington went first. He also proposes a new global oversight body, a tax on the revenue from tokens that displace workers, and legally protecting a share of occupations from automation.
From optimism to alarm in seven months
Gates was notably more sanguine in January. What shifted his position, on his account, was watching systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta break into live websites during security evaluations that were meant to be sealed off. He called those incidents shocking and said they ought to astonish people.
His institutional proposal, set out in a blog post yesterday, borrows from three existing regimes: nuclear inspection, aviation safety rules and the ozone treaties. He is dismissive of the alternative on the table — Demis Hassabis has suggested a body modelled on the American financial regulator FINRA — arguing the debate over which template to copy is beside the point until governments agree what would actually trigger action. He also wants states monitoring whether models can design molecules or assist a biological attack, a narrow capability check he presents as no threat to commercial development.
The two economic ideas
Gates envisages taxing what companies earn from tokens used to replace labour, funding a safety net from the substitution itself. That is the same instrument the IPPR proposed for Britain overnight, arrived at independently — two serious proposals for metering AI output as a tax base inside a single day.
The second idea is blunter: reserve as much as 40% of today’s jobs for people. He reached it partly through his father’s Alzheimer’s care, which he describes as irreplaceably human. It also puts a number on the anxiety in yesterday’s Work Foundation survey, where six in ten large UK employers linked cutting entry-level roles to AI.
Looking forward
Gates plans to see Prime Minister Andy Burnham this autumn, which puts these arguments in front of a UK government still writing its own approach. His parting shot is aimed at the data centre protests spreading across Britain and elsewhere: those campaigners, he suggests, are objecting to the wrong thing given what is coming for the labour market.