Bill Gates
Director, ASU Mechanics of Democracy Laboratory.
“The notion that liability laws are how we're going to manage AI safety will be looked back on as kind of absurd. ... So we will take AI safety more seriously than we take airline safety, drug safety, car safety. That is guaranteed.”
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026
Nilay Patel asked whether product liability, the threat of being sued, could keep AI companies in line, and what happens with open-weight models running on home hardware. Gates argued that liability fails because the danger comes from people misusing models without safeguards, not from the companies themselves, and said the problem is harder than nuclear weapons.
Transcript
…about the safety things. But the personal agent thing is an expected development. I think AIs are really cool just as I intellectually explore things, even the work of the Gates Foundation. I'm far more empowered. But I agree with you, it'll get out to more people in this personal agent form.
…and run an open source open weight model on it, and it can do whatever you want. And I'm not sure where any of that liability would lie or what would control or align the behaviors of those open source models. Do you think that that is an ever-growing risk? Do you think that that can be controlled?
The notion that liability laws are how we're going to manage AI safety will be looked back on as kind of absurd. Bad people doing bioattacks, you know, you don't go to the court and say, oh, okay, even finding who's doing these attacks, the liability model fails in every respect because it's not the AI companies themselves. It's the people who take particularly the models without safeguards and do these things. So we will take AI safety more seriously than we take airline safety, drug safety, car safety. That is guaranteed. Whether it's going to be enough, this is harder, harder than nuclear weapons, harder than any of those other things. What are we going to do about
an open source model running on a PC that somebody built with just a random NVIDIA graphics card in it?
I would hope that models above a certain capability that we find a way to require the safeguards and monitoring to be maintained in those models. I admit as time goes on that if we don't fairly soon decide to do that, you're going to have a level of capability that's out in dark corners that you…
pose the limit? A
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