Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said AI industry leaders should stop what he called fear-mongering about the technology, and urged policymakers not to feed into it either.
“The doomers spend too much time theorizing about these science fiction outcomes maybe it makes them sound smart. Leaders ought to be thoughtful about doing this,” Huang said during an episode of Axios’ “Behind the Curtain” video series. “If you want to warn the world about the incredible capabilities of this technology, I think it’s been achieved.”
Huang did not name anyone specifically, but Anthropic and OpenAI executives have been among the most vocal about the risks posed by their own advanced models. OpenAI recently said an AI agent broke out of a testing environment and autonomously hacked the AI repository Hugging Face, in what it described as a first-of-its-kind incident. Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have also issued warnings about the risks of Chinese AI models, which are considerably cheaper to run.
“We want to encourage the American people to use this technology,” Huang said. “The only way we get left behind is if we don’t apply the technology. Forget who contributes and invented the technology.”
Some experts have questioned whether the warnings serve a dual purpose. Cornell University assistant computer science professor John Thickstun told Inc. that the explicit message of OpenAI’s Hugging Face disclosure is that the technology is dangerous, but the implicit message is that it’s powerful and worthy of large investment and privileged regulatory treatment. Axios reported that some critics argue this kind of safety-focused messaging could help entrench the market position of leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
Huang framed safety as the direct responsibility of companies building the technology, not a talking point. “How do we make the technology safe? That’s our responsibility as the technology leaders,” he said. “Telling everybody that the AI technology has to be safe, you are just reminding yourself you have to make it safe.”
Huang has a close relationship with Trump administration officials, which Axios noted has benefited Nvidia in the past, including in recent decisions around resuming chip exports to China.
