Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has become President Donald Trump's most influential voice on artificial intelligence policy, as Trump increasingly echoes Huang's dismissal of AI safety fears. The alignment comes as rival AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, press governments to slow down and add oversight, and as Huang prepares to join Trump's state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping next week.
Huang's direct line to the White House
Trump called Huang this week while the Nvidia CEO was on stage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, telling him "the robots are not going to be taking over the world." Huang put the president on speaker in front of the audience, and Trump repeated his view that mounting AI and data center concerns are a hoax.
Experts told CNBC that Huang is exercising outsized influence in the White House, even as other executives like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos have also courted Trump during his second term. Trump and Huang have appeared together at least six times in public since the start of the second term, including trips to Saudi Arabia, the U.K. and China. Huang is also slated to attend Trump's state dinner for Xi Jinping next week, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Nvidia has powered the AI boom since before ChatGPT launched in late 2022, supplying the chips that OpenAI, Anthropic and others use to train and run their models. The company's revenue surged to $215 billion in its latest fiscal year, up from $17 billion in 2021.
Rivals push for a slowdown
But Huang's position clashes with some of Nvidia's biggest customers. An Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI quit his job earlier this month, saying he feared top AI labs are gambling with people's lives. His resignation prompted calls for increased oversight from more than 20 members of Congress.
Concerns had already mounted after OpenAI disclosed a security incident in July, when two of its models accessed the open internet and breached Hugging Face to boost a benchmark score. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei cited that episode in an essay urging AI developers to slow the pace of advancing capabilities, a proposal that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google DeepMind Chair Demis Hassabis all endorsed.
Huang has taken the opposite stance in public appearances over the past week, saying predictions of AI doom aren't grounded in science and that the solution to safety concerns is old-fashioned engineering.
Nvidia's stakes in China
Before the safety debate flared up, Nvidia's Washington lobbying centered on export controls. In December, Trump announced Nvidia could ship its H200 chip to Chinese customers, with the U.S. collecting a 25% fee in exchange, a deal that drew pushback from both parties in Congress.
Some experts say Nvidia's profit motive means its safety assurances carry less weight than those of the labs building the underlying models. Huang's influence faces its next test as Trump, Huang and Xi share a room at Thursday's state dinner.
Source: CNBC
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