The Gates Foundation has pledged to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years to expand global access to artificial intelligence and use it to tackle social inequalities.

The intervention came amid a growing debate over the risks posed by the technology, with many of the industry’s leading figures calling for a slowdown in its development.

The foundation’s annual Goalkeepers report, released Monday, advocated an urgent effort to ensure that AI “helps narrow gaps between the richest and poorest rather than widening them.”

The funding will be used to support AI projects in healthcare, agriculture and education, and to develop data sets in more languages.

“The window to influence who benefits, and how soon, is short,” the report argued.

If AI keeps developing as it is, “the most capable tools will be built first for the people and institutions most able to pay for them,” according to the report, “not necessarily for those who could benefit most.”

Most of the data used to train the early large language models was in English, according to the report, “leaving many communities that could benefit from AI poorly represented in the data on which these tools were built.”

The foundation said it would divide the new funding among external groups working on its priorities, spanning work like encouraging AI use among doctors, farmers and teachers, or developing data sets in more languages. Though significant, the funding is a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars at the disposal of commercial AI firms.

Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft and the chair of the Gates Foundation, has warned that AI could pose a grave threat to jobs and human life. “In terms of equity, AI will either be the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst source of injustice,” he wrote in an essay on his personal website last month, predicting that the transition to the new AI era would be one of the “most turbulent times in human history.”

According to Gates, who no longer works at Microsoft, the tech industry is knowingly downplaying threats posed by AI because there is so much money on the line.

The Gates Foundation’s announcement came after the CEO of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of AI development after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Top executives at other major AI companies, including Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI; Elon Musk, who founded SpaceXAI; and Demis Hassabis, the chair of Google DeepMind, agreed on the need for a slower pace.

Last month, Gates warned that AI would spread across the economy, possibly causing job losses and leaving little room for one industry to absorb the refugees from another. The biggest tech companies in the world, including Microsoft, are racing to help corporate customers adopt AI, and have said it could replace many workers.

On Monday, Gates urged the governments and companies developing the technology to focus on how AI could help people who have the most to gain from the technology, rather than the most profitable users.

“We can harness AI for good,” Gates wrote. “But it won’t happen by accident.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Claire Moses/Chona Kasinger
c. 2026 The New York Times Company