Labs will have to be shut down – Nvidia CEO responds to calls from OpenAI and Anthropic to tighten AI regulation

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has offered a simple solution for frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, which have recently grown more insistent in their calls for stricter regulation of their own models.

In an interview with Ezra Klein of The New York Times, Huang said that if there's a real threat, "we have to shut the labs down." His logic is pragmatic – if developers can't keep their experiments under control, those experiments need to stop.

Huang also pointed to the civil and criminal liability that already applies to the actions of rogue AI agents. At the same time, he called the fears coming from frontier labs a distraction rather than a genuine reason for new laws.

Talk of AI regulation picked up this summer after an OpenAI agent hacked Hugging Face, a popular platform for hosting AI models. Hugging Face now belongs to Nvidia, and had the chipmaker owned the platform at the time of the attack, OpenAI could have faced a lawsuit seeking damages.

Following that incident, several frontier labs, including Anthropic and Alphabet (Google), began using the image of rogue AI agents as both a marketing tool and an argument for regulatory intervention. They're likely hoping to be first at the table to shape the rules going forward.

Huang himself remains skeptical of these calls. Just days earlier, he put the odds of AI destroying the world by 2030 at 0% and dismissed the more extreme predictions. At the same time, he noted that frontier labs "never should ship products before they're ready and deliver products that are unsafe."

Until recently, AI developers and their main hardware supplier were largely on the same page when it came to AI policy. But the push by major labs to effectively take control of regulation themselves has created a rift.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceXAI agreed among themselves to slow the pace of model development, and now the parties to that agreement face an antitrust lawsuit, with plaintiffs calling the plan "self-serving" and claiming it had been in the works for months.

In his conversation with Klein, Huang shifted the focus away from collective industry responsibility and onto the decisions of individual executives.

These are companies with agency. If I believe that I'm about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability... to not launch that product. And so I can't buy into the idea that somehow, all of Americans, around 400 million of us, are pushing them to launch untested products that are unreliable.

That said, Huang doesn't consider himself opposed to regulation as a concept. In his view, OpenAI and Anthropic went from research institutions to companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars in a short span of time, and they should act accordingly.

I'm saying that we have lots of laws and regulations. Apply it.

He also clarified exactly what he sees as the problem with the current debate.

I'm not against laws and regulations. I'm against, currently, the distraction.

In the meantime, reports of rogue AI agents keep piling up. Overall, there's no sign that anyone, anywhere, is actually slowing down AI development. Everyone talks about it publicly, but in practice, they keep pushing forward at their own pace.