Bill Gates Warns AI Could Enable Catastrophe Killing a Billion People

Gates is not making a capability claim so much as a governance one: his argument is that the threat class — cyberattacks on hospitals, grids and financial systems — scales faster than voluntary corporate guardrails, which shifts the burden onto regulators and law enforcement. That framing matters for crypto and RWA infrastructure, where critical settlement and custody layers sit inside the same target set and are often governed by patchwork rules. The open question is whether mandatory oversight arrives as harmonized standards or as fragmented national rules that compliance teams must reconcile.