Bill Gates Warns Really 'Bad People' Will Exploit AI To Create 'A Lot of Negative Surprises'

Bill Gates has warned that criminals using artificial intelligence without safeguards could trigger 'a lot of negative surprises' within the next year, with cyberattacks his chief immediate concern.

The Microsoft co-founder has described AI as 'the most dangerous technology humans ever invented'. He has raised concerns about technology enabling biological attacks since 2017 and examined malicious AI use in an August 2026 essay that addressed both medical advances and deliberately engineered disease.

AI Safeguards and Cybercrime

'The real danger right now is not the AIs getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have. It's really bad people using AI, particularly an AI where you can takeout all the safeguards,' Gates told CNN's Jake Tapper.

His warning focused on what could happen when people with malicious intentions gain access to the latest systems without those protections.

'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,' he added.

Gates outlined attacks that could hold an individual, organisation or government to ransom, with demands for large sums of money or favours. He also described the possibility of attackers deliberately causing disruption in the stock market, having placed bets in advance to profit from the instability they triggered.

At issue is access to capabilities that previously demanded specialist computer or financial knowledge. AI could make those attacks easier to attempt with limited expertise and funding, and enable criminals to operate at scale.

Bioweapons Feature in AI Warning

Cybercrime is one part of Gates's concerns. His August 2026 essay addressed the possibility of malicious actors manipulating pathogens and developing novel biological weapons, alongside the technology's potential benefits for public health.

'Although AI will lead to lifesaving advances in drugs and vaccines, it will also make it easier to design a deadly new disease. Again, the positive capabilities are hard to separate from the dangerous ones. This is a global problem,' he wrote.

Expanding on that argument in an interview with MIT Technology Review, Gates described the threat of bioterrorism as 'about 50 times more scary, more likely than a natural pandemic risk.'

That comparison reflected Gates's own assessment of the danger, combining his concern about bioterrorism with his view of its likelihood relative to a natural pandemic.

Earlier Alarms Predate Modern AI

In 2017, Gates told a security conference in Munich that technology-enabled biological weapons could eventually kill tens of millions of people. His remarks considered how advances in technology might enable a terrorist to create a disease capable of spreading widely.

'The next epidemic has a good chance of originating on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus or a contagious and highly deadly strain of flu,' he told the conference.

The warning also covered naturally occurring disease. Citing epidemiologists' models in that speech, Gates stated that a pathogen spread through the respiratory route could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year, whether it arose naturally or through a terrorist attack. He considered there to be a reasonable probability of such an event in the years ahead.