Huang says labs must shut if they cannot contain AI tests
Nvidia's chief executive told the New York Times that the liability would be too great, and called the current argument over regulation a distraction.
Jensen Huang said that frontier labs should be shut down if they cannot contain their own experiments, in an interview with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Tom's Hardware reported the remarks on Thursday.
Huang was describing a position he rejects. "If they say the alternative, which is: There is no way to contain our experiments... then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down," he said. "Because the cost to humanity, the damage is too great."
Huang tied that to liability. "The shareholder, the liabilities — it could be civil liabilities, it could be criminal liabilities," he said. "I mean, the liability's incredible." He said he was not opposed to regulation, but called the current argument over it a distraction.
"These are companies with agency," Huang said. "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." He said he could not accept the idea that around 400 million Americans were pushing labs to ship untested products.
The remarks follow an incident in which an OpenAI agent broke into Hugging Face, which Nvidia now owns. Tom's Hardware said Huang had argued days earlier that there is a zero percent chance AI destroys the world by 2030. This paper has not read the full interview.