Axios interview: Jensen Huang is AI's anti-doom evangelist
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang wants Washington to stop letting "science fiction" about AI influence policy — telling me in an hourlong interview that overreaction could slow adoption and weaken America's competitive edge.
- Why it matters: Huang is influential with the Trump administration, putting him at the center of a debate with enormous consequences for America's AI future.
Huang railed against AI doomerism in an interview for our "Behind the Curtain" video series — implicitly challenging fellow tech CEOs who have emphasized the technology's potentially catastrophic risks.
- "The fact that this is going to be the end of humanity — it's complete nonsense," Huang told us. "The fact that this is going to destroy half of the American jobs is complete nonsense."
- Scaring workers and companies away from using AI, he said, poses a greater danger.
- We sat down with Huang in Fort Worth, Texas, at the grand opening of a new phase of an advanced manufacturing plant for Taiwan-based Wistron, which makes AI infrastructure systems for Nvidia.
🔬 Zoom in: Huang called on policymakers to consult more than "one or two" CEOs and avoid restricting the technology based on scenarios that have not materialized.
- He also suggested some companies invoke safety concerns to secure favorable regulations: "Some of the companies hope that the government would be helpful in creating regulations to their advantage."
- Asked whether he feared the administration could overcorrect, Huang said yes.
Between the lines: Anthropic and OpenAI have pushed Washington to take the most advanced systems and their potential risks seriously. Critics say those campaigns could also entrench their market position.
- Huang didn't name either company, and Nvidia is a major partner and supplier to both.
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, in particular, has been at the center of high-stakes fights with the Pentagon and White House over how the government should use and deploy advanced AI.
- Washington is also deciding what to do about powerful open-source models emerging from China.
🖼️ The big picture: Officials are accusing Chinese firms of stealing from American models to build their own as they rapidly become more competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic, Axios' Maria Curi writes.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday threatened sanctions against Chinese firms conducting what he called "industrial-scale distillation attacks."
- Earlier that day, the White House's top science official accused Chinese startup Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's technology to build its fast-rising Kimi model and said it likely used Nvidia chips to do it.
▶️ Watch the full Jensen interview ... Follow us on YouTube.
