Gates Proposes Robot Tax, 'Human Reserved' Jobs to Curb AI Harm

In a nearly 6,000-word essay posted to his personal website on Wednesday, and in a subsequent hourlong interview with The New York Times, Bill Gates, the 70-year-old co-founder of Microsoft, said artificial intelligence poses risks that the tech industry is knowingly playing down because "there was too much money on the line." Addressing those risks urgently, he said, should be "the world's top priority."

Gates told The New York Times that people inside the industry who understand how capable AI systems have become are privately alarmed but reluctant to say so in public. "In private, people who understand how good this stuff is, and how much better it's getting, they're very worried," he said, adding that executives now tell each other: "Hey, man, don't say that. It's bad for us — the next trillion dollars we're trying to raise."

A tax on replacing people with machines

The most concrete idea in Gates' essay is a new levy on automation. The New York Times described it as a "token tax" — a token being the basic unit of AI computing — meant to make it more expensive for companies to use AI instead of human labor, with the proceeds funding retraining programs and a stronger safety net for displaced workers. TechCrunch, drawing on the essay itself, framed the same push differently, as a "robot tax" that would close a loophole in the tax code: an employer who hires a person pays payroll taxes on their earnings, but one who buys a robot can typically write off the purchase immediately as a business expense. "The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines," Gates wrote, arguing that taxing automation "would slow the rush away from human labor a little" while raising money for the same retraining and safety-net goals. The two accounts do not fully agree on the mechanism — whether the tax falls on AI computing itself or on capital purchases that substitute for workers — a distinction Gates' essay does not appear to resolve in the excerpts published so far.

• "Token tax": a levy on AI compute usage, aimed at making automation costlier relative to human labor.
• "Robot tax": removing the accounting advantage that lets employers write off automation purchases faster than they can deduct payroll costs.
• "Human Reserved" jobs: a legal category of roles — such as caregiving — where AI could not be used to replace workers, even if it were technically capable.

Gates also proposed setting aside certain occupations as "Human Reserved," meaning AI would be barred from performing them even where it is technically capable. He gave two kinds of justification, according to TechCrunch's account of the essay: economic ones, and human ones. "You can't tell a 55-year-old who has worked in construction their whole career that they need to go work at an elder care facility and expect them to find it fulfilling," he wrote. In other cases, he argued, a task should stay human-only regardless of cost or efficiency: "imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease. There's no technical reason why it couldn't. Yet it shouldn't." He said the list of reserved jobs would evolve over time, with some roles phased toward AI "over years or decades" under a commitment to preserve others indefinitely.

Why the industry has stayed quiet

Gates argued that companies are simply responding to market incentives that can conflict with the broader interest of society, and predicted that past patterns — in which new technology created more jobs than it destroyed — will not repeat this time. "Utterly, absolutely, completely, totally different," he said of the current moment, calling it "a hell of a claim, and I'm staking everything I know — everything." His reasoning, per the Times, is that AI is spreading across the entire economy at once, leaving little room for one industry to absorb workers displaced from another, unlike earlier waves of automation that displaced workers into adjacent sectors.

TechCrunch noted that both of Gates' proposals — the automation tax and Human Reserved jobs — would cut into the profits of major AI labs, which it suggested is "why we haven't heard much about them until now." Neither publication reported that any government has taken up either proposal, and TechCrunch flagged that Gates' essay leaves open who would decide which jobs qualify as Human Reserved and how such rules would be enforced.

Gates' economic warnings sit alongside a second concern in his essay: catastrophic misuse, such as bioterrorism enabled by AI systems that can help design new pathogens. He called for binding international agreements and mandatory safety reviews of any AI system that could be weaponized to create new molecules, dismissing the voluntary commitments favored by the White House and industry: "Self-regulation on the most dangerous tool ever invented? No, thanks!" The Times noted his warnings echo those of Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, whose similar alarm has put him at odds with the Pentagon and much of the industry. "You have people attacking the person who's the most open about the downsides," Gates said.

For now, neither the token/robot tax nor Human Reserved job categories exist in U.S. law, and Gates himself concedes the details — who decides, and how — remain unresolved. But if Congress or state legislatures were to take up either idea, American employers weighing AI adoption could face new costs tied to automation, and workers in fields like caregiving or other roles deemed hard to replace or deeply personal could gain explicit legal protection against being replaced by AI — a prospect that is not on the table today but that Gates is now pushing policymakers to consider.