“You know, there are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between specifically China and the U.S., where (it’s), ‘Oh my God, the aliens are coming!’ Well, believe me, the aliens are here — you know, a foreign intelligence with a different set of motivations that we can’t even understand. And so we need something almost surprising like that, in order to step up to it.”
“And ironically, we’re the ones that are birthing the aliens,” said another panelist, Tristan Harris, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, as Gates nodded. “So it’s actually within the full remit of the two countries to limit (uncontrolled growth of the tech), at least to the current level of alien intelligence that we’re at now.”
A general view as Bill Gates, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris, and Joshua Oppenheimer speak during the “AI AI AI” panel at the 2026 Telluride Film Festival at Elks Park on September 05, 2026 in Telluride, Colorado.
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“I put in my memo that if there was a credible plan that would cause this to be either slowed down or even held in stasis for a period of time, that I would likely support that,” he said. We live in an incentive structure that is very complex…”
At that point, a heckler interrupted — someone who appeared to possibly be associated with the mountain community, versus a film festival attendee — shouting about Jesus and yelling that Gates is “everything that’s wrong with America.”
At first Gates responded “Not helpful,” before quipping that he was not responsible “for everything wrong with America… according to me,” before resuming his train of thought as the heckler moved on.
“You can have two approaches to this,” he said. “One is to let the industry go at full speed, but have them do work that would monitor and minimize some of these damages, or you could try to slow the industry down. It’s worth remembering historically that when OpenAI got started, they understand they’re creating something quite unique, and that if they succeed, that there should be a special governance approach that overrides pure profit motive of the shareholders of OpenAI, and they actually created that mechanism. Likewise, when DeepMind is working with Google, they say we need to have a governance structure internally that can override what would be the normal incentive.
But he stressed he is not anti-AI generally. “I think everybody should be using AI. AI, in terms of helping you be curious and learn things, whether it’s about AI or disease or anything, is magical,” Gates said.
He also said he’s not jumping on the anti-date center bandwagon. “One thing that I would say is being against data centers is the kind of thing where you can think, ‘Oh, I’m making progress because I stopped a data center.’ Stopping data centers will not in one iota slow down or avoid any of the concerns that people have. The data centers will get built. And data centers, actually, done properly in terms of electricity use and everything, they in and of themselves are not really that meaningful of a problem. It’s the overall usage.”
“Frontier” developments at the fast-moving cutting edge of AI technology are what worried alll the panelists. “There’s a lot of fruits that are left not at the frontier,” Gates said. “If really the U.S. and China came together and said, ‘Actually, it’s now illegal to do the next level frontier until we get it safe,’ I could actually see a world where the competitive pressures shift. They pivot from pushing at the frontier to pushing to who’s the best country and company at integrating it into our economy to get the best GDP boost without pushing past the controllability frontiers…
“Some of the companies are not self-regulating. And the world is very spoiled since World War II, that when there were global problems, the U.S. would kind of show up and say, ‘OK, we’ve got aviation, we’ve got nuclear, we’ve got ozone, we’ve got piracy’ — whatever it is — it would show up in a benign way and, either through the UN or through (engaging other) countries, solve problems. And so the world is not as used to filling that vacuum — not Europe, not China, not India, not the UN Security Council. And so if it’s not gonna be the U.S., well, who takes the first move? Then we sure need to activate the others. But we should do everything to try and get the U.S. engaged from the beginning.”
Gates posed the question of whether this is “the greatest problem humanity has ever faced,” and then answered his own query: “That is just a fact.”
The “AI AI AI” panel was moderated by Joshua Oppenheimer, the Oscar-nominated director of “The Act of Killing.”
Telluride Film Festival executive director also programmed other AI-themed events for the 53rd festival, including a multimedia presentation titled “The Humanity Dilemma,” saying this rare example of Telluride taking a stand on a current event was apropos because “we are a humanist festival.” But the festival is also taking a look at what good uses AI can be put to by the film industry, with a panel scheduled for Sunday titled “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy: AI for Societal Benefit,” which will include representatives from the documentary “Love, Rendered,” a Darren Aronofsky-produced film which used AI to recreate moments in its subjects’ history.
