SAN FRANCISCO — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI industry doesn’t need any new laws Tuesday during San Francisco’s annual Dreamforce megaconference hosted by Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff, doubling down on arguments that have also been voiced by President Donald Trump.
“We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations,” Huang, one of the leading luminaries of the AI industry as head of one of the most profitable companies, said during an interview with the Salesforce CEO.
His comments at one of San Francisco’s biggest tech conferences highlighted the divide among industry leaders over AI safety, after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set off a political firestorm over the weekend with his calls to slow the pace of AI development. Huang spoke just minutes after Amodei also did with Benioff, who congratulated him on his company’s development of AI technology being increasingly plugged into Salesforce.
Huang has formed a seemingly close relationship with Trump during his second term: Just the day before, he received a call from the president while onstage at a separate event in Los Angeles, putting him on speakerphone where they agreed recent existential warnings about AI were overstated, with Trump calling them a “hoax.”
The Nvidia CEO on Tuesday also echoed similar arguments made by other leading Republicans, including Trump AI adviser David Sacks and House Speaker Mike Johnson, who have both said it should be primarily up to AI companies to handle safety issues.
“If you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability or safety, then don’t release it,” Huang said.
He also called worries that AI could automate away jobs “completely nonsense.”
Amodei and others have meanwhile pushed for more guardrails and committed to giving outside safety checkers access to his company’s programs.
On Tuesday, OpenAI backed a bipartisan plan in the House for third-party safety assessments, while Elon Musk called for leading labs and Chinese companies to peer-review each other’s models.
Ahead of the Dreamforce conference last year, Benioff himself prompted controversy in the traditionally liberal San Francisco with his comments backing Trump and the idea of sending the National Guard to the city. He later apologized. But on Tuesday, he largely played the role of impartial interviewer, asking Amodei to describe the “state of the AI industry and pacing.”
Amodei’s response was the other side of the coin from Huang’s so-called accelerationist approach.
“Let’s organize the rest of the industry and say, ‘What can we do to set standards for everyone?’” Amodei said.