Trump calls AI safety fears a 'hoax' on speakerphone as Nvidia's Huang vows no slowdown
The president phoned Jensen Huang live at the All-In Summit, praised data centers as the oil of the next 25 years, and said critics play into China's hands.
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang was onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday morning when President Donald Trump called him. Huang put the call on speaker so the audience could hear it. Huang and the podcast's hosts, who include White House advisers David Friedberg and David Sacks, had been discussing Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei's call to slow the pace of AI capability gains. Trump used the call to attack that idea. He said the robots and the AI will not be taking over the rest of the world and called the whole thing a hoax. He suggested critics were playing into the hands of political people or China. He praised data centers as great and said they make people and states wealthy, describing AI as the oil of the next 20 to 25 years and bigger than the internet. Huang, who told the summit that Nvidia is not going to let a slowdown happen, told the president that thousands of people were clapping. TechCrunch's Connie Loizos notes that Nvidia's business depends on AI labs buying more chips, so downplaying existential risk is the only move if Huang cares about the share price. The exchange puts the White House and the largest AI chipmaker publicly against a pledge that Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Elon Musk have backed over the past three days.