Don't let the black leather jacket fool you, Jensen Huang isn't a doomer. Nvidia's CEO said as much in an interview with CBS News aired on Sunday. He accused the leaders of the frontier AI labs of being disingenuous in their warnings that, without more AI oversight, the products they are building could harm humanity in myriad forms.
"Go and read between the lines," Huang said, referring to AI leaders calling for government regulation of the industry. "They're actually not asking for more laws. They're asking to be relieved of the laws we do have."
"They must be doing it for ulterior reasons," he added.
Huang said he didn't know exactly what those ulterior reasons are, but that scaring people about the tech is "irresponsible" and "unnecessary."
Huang's comments on Sunday echo those of President Donald Trump, who said on Saturday that new regulations aren't needed to ensure the tech remains safe.
"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry," the president said on Truth Social, his social media platform.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has also rejected the idea that tech companies need government intervention to ensure the safety of their AI models. In a Fox News interview on Sunday, he said the AI labs could just go ahead and "just stop" if they think their products are dangerous.
Last week, a chorus of leading AI CEOs said AI development should be slowed down until adequate risk-prevention measures could be put in place.
In an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed a three-pronged plan that would, in his view, strengthen safeguards to ensure AI remains under the control of human engineers.
One of those prongs included calls for the US government, "for antitrust reasons," to regulate frontier AI labs. Amodei's essay was signal-boosted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Huang has emerged as a prominent anti-regulation voice, together with Trump and David Sacks, a presidential advisor on science and tech.
In the CBS interview, Huang reiterated previous concerns that a slowdown among US labs would cede ground to China in the global AI race, and that AI labs don't need government help to implement a slowdown.
"We don't need more regulations," Huang said. "We need to apply the current regulations we have."