It was a rainy day when I met Bill Gates. That was in late 1999 at a Microsoft event in Seattle. We had a short chat about an aquisition. My impression was that he was a smart guy, but not very intelligent. Later that day he gave a talk. His PowerPoint presentation promptly blue-screened. He was embarrassed and helpless.
Gates knows a bit or two about how to profit from monopolizing software. Seen in that light his recent demand for regulation by claiming that AI could ’cause a billion deaths’ may even make sense:
In an interview with NBC Meet the Press, Gates said AI developers should be required to implement safeguards and monitoring systems, arguing that voluntary industry self-regulation is not enough.
“You need law enforcement and the politicians to get into the discussion about what safeguards and monitoring look like,” Gates told the outlet. “And that has to be a required thing.”
World to Gates: We already have laws that prohibit doing bad stuff. We also have law enforcement agencies. We have courts and judges that penalize people for doing bad things.
Killing a billion people is bad. It is prohibited for good reasons. Attempts to do so are criminal. People who try will go to jail.
To claim that AI could kill a billion people is like claiming that fire could kill a billion people. Of course it could. But no, it doesn’t.
After some unauthorized attempts to break into non-public databases and websites there has been embarrassing talk about ‘rogue AI agents‘.
There is no such thing as a ‘rogue’ AI agent. There is only deterministic software, written and launched by humans, that wraps around Large Language Models.
To understand how that works lets look inside:
An AI agent harness is the software infrastructure that wraps around a large language model (LLM) and enables it to act on tasks, not just respond to prompts. The model reasons through a problem and decides what to do next. The harness connects it to the tools, systems, memory and execution environments needed to carry out those actions.
Agent = Model + Harness
Think of the model as the “brain” that generates reasoning and decisions. The harness is everything around it that helps the agent operate safely and reliably, including:
- Tools: APIs, code execution, search, databases and business applications
- Memory: Prior context, user preferences and workflow history
- Workspace: Files, data, environments and systems the agent can access
- Guardrails: Permissions, policies, approvals and monitoring
Without a harness, a model can answer questions, but it can’t reliably run code, call APIs, access files, remember prior work or complete multi-step workflows on its own.
An AI agent, tasked with whatever, can and will only break into a website, if its harness (and the computer the ‘agent’ is running on) fails to stop it from doing so.
Whoever has programmed that harness (or miss-administrates the underlying system) is at least negligent in his duty. It is that person which is accountable for the agents misbehavior. It is that person which, where appropriate, should go to jail.
There is a very simple way for preventing AI agents from OpenAI or Anthropic from going ‘rogue’. Harshly penalize the CEOs of these companies, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, each and every time their agents do.
AI systems do not think, feel, want or understand. They don’t go ‘rogue’.
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