Summary
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in the middle of an onstage interview at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was the President of the…
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was in the middle of an onstage interview at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles when his phone rang. It was the President of the United States. Huang put him on speakerphone, and the two men used the moment to deliver a joint message: fears that artificial intelligence will take over the world are, in their telling, a hoax.
"The robots will not be taking over," President Donald Trump told the audience of technology executives, investors and founders. "The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax."
Trump praised data centers as "great," saying they make people and states wealthy, and called data "the oil of the next 20 to 25 years" — bigger, he said, than the internet. He argued that critics of AI development are playing into the hands of political opponents and of China. "We're not going to let that happen," he said.
Huang agreed on the spot. "We're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race of America — every industry, every company, every state, every people," he said, adding: "Whoever wins AI, wins. That's how big it is."
The surprise call landed in the middle of an already heated industry argument. Days earlier, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon had resigned from the AI lab, warning publicly that people building the technology believe it could threaten humanity's survival within the decade. Calls for frontier AI development to slow down had been growing louder.
Trump amplified his position on social media, posting repeatedly on Truth Social about what he called another hoax — that AI is going to "take over, consume, and destroy the world" — and dubbing himself "the Hoax Buster." His administration has argued that the private sector can address AI risks and that American dominance over China is essential, and the president said he saw no need for additional AI regulation.
Huang's own remarks at the summit were more measured than the president's. He praised Coxon for having "great courage" to raise his concerns, while rejecting predictions that AI could end the world as "not grounded in science." He said AI companies should pause or pace their work if they feel their development is out of control. In a separate television interview, he argued that development should move "as fast as we can" without compromising safety, and that companies releasing unsafe products remain subject to existing laws.
Critics of the administration's approach pushed back elsewhere, with a rival "pro-human" conference drawing figures as different as Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon to highlight the societal risks of rapid AI development.
The episode underscored how completely the politics of AI have shifted. The question dividing Washington and Silicon Valley is no longer whether the technology is transformative, but whether its dangers justify slowing down — and on that question, the president and the chief executive of the company supplying the industry's core hardware have now publicly taken the same side, live, on speakerphone.
Source: Axios
