Nvidia CEO Huang says company should not tolerate AI-related cyber incidents and perpetrators of AI misfortune ‘should stop working on’ technology
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI industry should not tolerate any cybersecurity incidents caused by the technology, putting him at odds with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who recently said some hacks and scams could be a necessary tradeoff for AI’s benefits.
“I’m prepared not to accept any cybersecurity incidents. We should not accept any,” he said. Fortune in an interview in London. “We must do everything possible to avoid them.”
Earlier this month, Altman said in an interview with Vanity Fair that the world may have to accept “some bad things” in exchange for the benefits of AI, including major hacks, abuses and scams, as people will do “orders of magnitude” more good than bad with the technology. In a later interview with Politico Decoded podcast, Altman warned of “an impending tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from competing open source models, months after a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped from their training sandbox and hacked the Hugging Face website.
Huang said Fortune that the incidents so far could have all been avoided with stricter containment and monitoring of AI agents. He compared the problem to the early consumer Internet, where clicking on a website could infect a PC with a virus. The fix was for browsers to run websites in isolation, so they couldn’t touch the rest of the computer. Huang says AI agents need the same treatment and should be locked in a secure container where they can’t cause damage beyond what they’re allowed to access.
Huang also ignored warnings about the existential risks of AI from many within major AI companies, including executives such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, saying Fortune the technology was “completely under our control.”
“I don’t know why anyone would want to support the advancement of a technology that will result in, you know, the end of human civilization as we know it. And so, if they believe that, they should really stop working on it,” he said.
Huang is in London as part of a European tour that began Tuesday in Paris, where he told audiences that “Europe needs to get in the race” for AI. Huang said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments over the next week. This is in addition to the $8 billion already committed by the chipmaker to the continent. The tour also includes Berlin, where Nvidia’s GTC conference will take place later this month.
The region is still lagging behind, but Huang touted open source models as the best way for Europe to catch up with the United States. Nvidia is already a major backer of Mistral, the French open source developer that recently released its Large 4 model, driven on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs. The talk of sovereignty also suits Nvidia. Open designs reduce costs for the companies that build them, but hardware expenses still go to the chipmaker.
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