Gates: AI Has Surpassed Me at Programming

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has admitted that modern artificial intelligence systems now outperform him when it comes to writing code.

According to Gates, he reached this conclusion after trying out Claude Code, an AI-powered tool developed by the U.S. company Anthropic. He noted that programming is the field he knows best, which made the system's abilities especially striking to him.

The Microsoft founder said that technological breakthroughs have genuinely surprised him only three times in his life. The first was in 1980, when he saw a graphical user interface that later became the foundation of modern personal computers. The second came in 2022, when OpenAI executives showed him the system that would become ChatGPT. The third was his encounter with Claude Code in 2026.

Gates also warned that the rapid advancement of AI poses a risk of mass job losses and could make it easier to create biological weapons. He called for stronger oversight of such systems, including a tax on their use and a ban on replacing humans with AI in certain professions.

These remarks were reported by RIA Novosti from Washington on August 26.