Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said in a CBS Mornings interview on Monday that US president Donald Trump’s view that artificial intelligence (AI) risks are a ‘hoax’ reflects a societal blind spot. ‘Most of society is still not aware of how quickly it’s moving,’ Gates said, adding that Trump is ‘in the place that everybody else is in’, where the first reaction is to ask whether AI is just like the technologies of the past.

He said ‘AI is almost an evolutionary event’ and that, if the president wants credit for helping the entire world, AI is his best bet: ‘The leader that brings people together there will deserve positive recognition.’ Gates cited risks of bioterrorism and financial hacks and said his foundation is spending $1bn on large language models in languages beyond English. The interview came after OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called for slowing development.