Bill Gates on Sunday warned that unregulated artificial intelligence poses a growing threat and predicted an escalation in AI-powered cyberattacks in the coming year.

The Microsoft co-founder said the risk of AI "getting out of control" remained years away and emphasized that the immediate concern was "bad people" using existing systems without safeguards.

"The front that we'll probably see most dramatically in the next year is cyberattacks," Gates said in an interview with ABC News.

"The real danger right now is not the AI's getting out of control. We need to work on that, but that's years away in terms of the big impact that might have," he said.

"It's really bad people using AI, particularly in AI where you can take out all the safeguards," he said, adding that increased restrictions were needed to prevent bad actors using AI for bioterrorism and cyberattacks.

"But right now, you're allowed to take all those safeguards out. So when you have bad people, no safeguards, and then the latest models, that's where, over the next year, primarily in the cyber area, we are going to have a lot of negative surprises," he told ABC.

Gates -- who warned in a lengthy August post that the world was dangerously unprepared for the upheaval brought by AI, especially to employment -- is the latest tech magnate to sound the alarm on the threats posed by the new technology.

In his interview Sunday, he dismissed the idea -- advocated by US President Donald Trump -- that self-regulation by AI companies was sufficient to keep the world safe.

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