The story

Bill Gates warned that artificial intelligence could deepen global inequality rather than combat it, and urged world leaders and technology companies to act now. The Microsoft co-founder made the appeal in the Gates Foundation's annual Goalkeepers report, which tracks progress on United Nations development goals. Gates wrote that AI could be a great equalizer or widen the gap, and that decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months will determine whether the technology primarily benefits the richest or reaches those who have the least.

The Gates Foundation announced Tuesday it will spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand access to AI and AI-enabled solutions. According to the foundation, 40% of the funds will support education including AI tutoring, 40% will support healthcare uses like diagnostics and drug development, 10% will help small farmers, and 10% will fund building digital infrastructure. The donation will also fund efforts to train AI models on local languages, noting that more than 90% of data used to train early models came from English sources.

The announcement comes as tech leaders sound alarms about AI safety. An ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who previously worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, quit his job and warned that AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay calling on rival companies to slow AI development, which OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk backed. Gates told Reuters that no government is nearly as deep on AI as they have to be, saying governments are way behind. He said he has been talking to President Trump and his team about his concerns.