Aligned in opposing the "slowdown narrative"! As AI safety controversy heats up, Jensen Huang becomes Trump's "top ally"

Title context: Aligned in opposing the "slowdown narrative"! As AI safety controversy heats up, Jensen Huang becomes Trump's "top ally" Text: As the debate over artificial intelligence (AI) regulation intensifies, Jensen Huang, the helmsman of NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA.US), the world's most valuable company, is becoming U.S. President Trump's top ally in the AI safety controversy. Huang and Trump Are "On the Same Wavelength" in Opposing the AI "Slowdown Narrative" At the All-In Summit held in Los Angeles last Monday, Huang received a phone call from Trump. On the core question of whether the United States should slow down development because of concerns about AI risks, Trump said during the call: "Now some people are trying to stop data center construction. In my view, this is a scam." "Siasun Robot&Automation will not take over the world, and AI will not take over the world. Of course we should be cautious, but we cannot stop the entire industry just because of concerns about AI." Just before this summit, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of frontier AI model development in a warning article published on September 12. In the article, he stated bluntly that the risks brought by AI are "severe," and that time must be set aside to address these risks. The core concerns raised by Amodei are specific and urgent. He warned that at the current pace of development, AI could within 6 to 12 months have the ability to direct "swarms of agents" to take over the entire internet, and could cause losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars. He cited a recent security incident between OpenAI and Hugging Face as supporting evidence, pointing out that AI agents in testing have already demonstrated the ability to break out of restricted environments, connect to the internet, and penetrate targets. Amodei wrote: "I believe that if slowing down can buy us one to two more years before models reach critical capability levels, and we use that time to advance alignment work, we can greatly reduce the risk of serious problems." He proposed that independent auditors supervise the safety work of AI laboratories, and suggested that regulators allow these laboratories to cooperate in order to coordinate safety standards. This call was quickly echoed by two key figures. Musk reposted Amodei's post on the social media platform X, adding: "Dario is right." This tech magnate, who has repeatedly described AI as a "civilizational-level risk," took a position consistent with his long-standing stance this time, but the timing was intriguing: just a few days earlier, he had dismissed warnings from an internal Anthropic researcher about AI harms as a "conspiracy" and "psychological warfare." OpenAI helmsman Altman wrote on X: "I agree with Dario, we need to control the pace of frontier AI advancement." Altman's support went beyond words. He made clear in an interview that OpenAI will not hold an IPO in 2026, citing the current severe AI safety situation and saying that "going public now would be unwise." On September 14, Altman said the company supports establishing a unified federal AI safety framework to set consistent safety requirements for frontier AI laboratories, and said that "no degree of U.S. competitive pressure can be a reason for recklessness." However, at a time when AI industry giants rarely called in unison for "stepping on the brakes," Huang firmly opposed the "AI slowdown" position led mainly by Anthropic, taking a stance similar to Trump's. At the summit, Huang did not deny AI risks and also supported stricter testing and third-party evaluation, but he opposed slowing down the entire industry because of unverified "doomsday theories." Facing the recently escalating AI safety debate, Huang acknowledged: "Safety comes first, there is no doubt about that." He said the United States does not need to choose between safety and maintaining leadership, and that problems emerging inside frontier laboratories, concerns raised by whistleblowers, and safety incidents that have already occurred should all be taken seriously. But these real problems need to be distinguished from another category of predictions about the future. On one side are engineering problems that have already occurred and can be investigated and fixed; on the other are judgments that AI may destroy civilization or even offer specific "probabilities of extinction." Toward the latter, Huang is very tough. He believes such predictions lack sufficient scientific basis, yet because they come from researchers and frontier laboratories, they are easily understood by the public as scientific conclusions that have already been verified. Therefore, what Huang opposes is not AI safety itself, but directly deriving from unverified catastrophic predictions that the entire industry should pause or slow down. By contrast, Huang prefers to view AI safety as an engineering problem. If an accident occurs at a frontier laboratory, the first thing to do should be root cause analysis: what exactly happened, which links failed, what measures could have been taken, and what new technologies and processes should be established next. Then, through sandboxes, continuous monitoring, validation, and evaluation, the same problems should be blocked as much as possible before the next release. In Huang's judgment, the reason today's most frontier laboratories are more likely to expose risks is largely precisely because they have the most compute and are also handling the hardest problems. As these companies gradually transform from research institutions into real engineering organizations, they also need to build testing and control systems that match. At the Salesforce Dreamforce conference held in San Francisco last Tuesday, Huang said there is no need for any new laws in the AI industry. He reiterated that AI development should not be seen as a choice between safety and speed. He said: "You can absolutely have both. You can control the pace of development until you are confident in launching a product accepted by the market. Market forces will play a role in that." That day, Huang also echoed the views of other core Republican figures, including Trump's AI adviser David Sacks and House Speaker Mike Johnson, both of whom said safety issues should mainly be managed by AI companies themselves. Huang believes that instead of pleading with the U.S. government to intervene, AI companies should wait until they are sure their products are safe before releasing them. He said: "If you develop a product or service but are not confident in its functions, performance, and safety, then do not release it." Why Is Huang the "Opposing Side" in the AI Safety Debate? Although other tech leaders such as Meta (META.US) CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN.US) founder Jeff Bezos have moved closer to Trump during his second term, many experts say Huang is exerting unusual influence at the White House. According to a person familiar with the matter, Huang is expected to attend a high-profile state dinner for the Chinese leader during Trump's meeting with China's head of state next week. Since before the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, NVIDIA Corporation has been driving the AI boom, supplying graphics processing units (GPUs) used to train models and run large workloads for OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies. NVIDIA Corporation's revenue soared to $215 billion in its most recent fiscal year, compared with just $17 billion in 2021. Huang's position as the helmsman of the world's most valuable company and the CEO of a chipmaker at the center of the AI boom enables him to have the president listen to him on the most important AI issues. Samuel Hammond, AI policy director at the think tank Foundation for American Innovation, said in an interview: "Trump just likes winners, and Jensen Huang is very good at speaking in a way Trump can understand." Whether at a candlelit dinner with Trump at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida or thanking guests at the end of a keynote speech for "making America great again," Huang has learned how to win Trump's favor. Since the start of Trump's second term, the two have appeared publicly together at least six times, including trips to Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom, and a recent trip to China aboard Air Force One. Some analyses point out that as the "shovel seller" of this round of AI buildout, NVIDIA Corporation's revenue comes directly from the shipment pace of chips, systems, and data center infrastructure. Any legislation that slows the pace of model training and deployment will uncertainty in compute orders. Combined with the trillion-dollar-scale development expectations he raised earlier this year, his advocacy for opening up global sales, and his political capital as a member of Trump's tech advisory committee and as someone who once discouraged deploying the National Guard in San Francisco, it is not surprising that NVIDIA Corporation is highly aligned with this administration's deregulatory agenda. Last week's phone call played aloud in public was less an accident than a tacit public declaration of allegianceit highlighted the close alignment between a top semiconductor leader and the White House's deregulatory goals. Therefore, some also believe that Huang's clear opposition to the "AI slowdown narrative" has an obvious profit-seeking motive. This has led some experts to argue that, compared with the concerns of chipmakers, more attention should be paid to the concerns expressed by model developers, because these AI laboratories are the ones truly responsible for AI technology itself. Andrew Yoon, a researcher at the nonprofit CivAI, said: "From the perspective of 'let's just make money,' NVIDIA Corporation is the most aggressive." "At every key juncture, what they truly work to ensure is that no matter what happens, it benefits NVIDIA Corporation's profits."