Bill Gates has joined calls for U.S. legislation on artificial intelligence safeguards, warning that powerful AI could cause mass-casualty events in the wrong hands. President Donald Trump rejected the push, dismissing AI safety laws as a “hoax.”

Gates told NBC’s Meet the Press, aired Sept. 27: “No one thinks self-regulation is enough.” He called on Congress to pass AI safeguard legislation and warned AI is “certainly powerful enough to drive events that cause a billion deaths.”

Trump pushed back on Truth Social with “WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!” He argued that regulation would hand China an advantage and claimed the U.S. is about 1.5 years ahead of China in AI.

Gates is not alone among tech leaders. The CEOs of Anthropic, OpenAI, DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI have all called for slowing increasingly capable AI. Former Anthropic staffers have issued stark warnings: Jacob Coxon said AI could kill everyone by decade’s end, and Evan Hubinger put the odds above 10% within the decade. In a related ruling, a 2-1 appeals court decision let the Pentagon exclude Anthropic from defense contracts after it refused to remove Claude’s safeguards for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.