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The Turbulent AI Era Is Here: One Month On, the Critical Choices Are Being Made

September 23, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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On 26 August 2026 Bill Gates published “The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” Four weeks later, each choice he named has had a first public answer. President Trump rejected new guardrails and formed an “AI Force”, while his Treasury Secretary proposed a US-China AI incident notification mechanism ahead of today’s White House summit. A House bill would tax AI tokens or revenue, Australia has rejected a token tax as a “loser narrative”, and economists question whether token volume measures job loss at all. Human Reserved work has had wide coverage and no government adoption. And the Gates Foundation has committed $1 billion to wider AI access and convened a 60-organisation language coalition. This article scores each choice and sets out what UK businesses should do in the next 12 to 18 months.

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Bill Gates Is Deeply Worried About AI, and He’s No Longer Staying Quiet

August 26, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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On 26 August 2026 Bill Gates published “A turbulent AI era — and critical choices to make”, a roughly six-thousand-word essay on Gates Notes, alongside interviews with Axios, GeekWire and MIT Technology Review. The technology industry’s most reliable optimist for fifty years now says the AI transition will be one of the most turbulent periods in human history, that the industry has already crossed every safety threshold it named for itself — bio, cyber, psychosocial, job destruction and control — and that no coordinated plan exists. This breakdown separates the essay from the headlines: the five thresholds and what crossing each one means, the three proposals Gates puts forward (new national and international institutions, a category of “Human Reserved” work kept for people, and a tax on AI tokens and robots), the numbers he attaches to them, his objection to the June 2026 executive order on model testing, what he says AI companions are doing to children, where he still expects AI to do more good than harm, and the questions he openly admits he has not answered. It closes with what a business buying AI this year should actually do about it.