Jensen Huang on agents gone rogue and AI doomers

No one is more unequivocally synonymous with the AI boom than Jensen Huang.

The Nvidia CEO—a hard-charging engineer whose first job was washing dishes at Denny’s—has become the axis on which all AI seemingly turns. Nvidia’s GPUs are the essential and hard-to-get “shovels” of AI, and demand has led to the company’s valuation in the public markets reaching an astonishing $5 trillion-plus. (Nvidia is also functionally the central bank of the circular AI economy.) In AI, all roads lead to Nvidia, and especially to Huang himself.

Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn and Beatrice Nolan sat down with Huang in London this week, where Huang sounded off on the headline-grabbing cybersecurity incidents of recent months, including the moment where OpenAI agents autonomously coordinated to attack startup Hugging Face. (Nvidia, notably, agreed in September to acquire Hugging Face, an open source platform, for almost $13 billion.) As Kahn and Nolan write:

Huang told Fortune that the incidents so far could all have been avoided with stronger containment and monitoring of AI agents. He compared the problem to the early consumer internet, when 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 sealed inside a secure container where they can’t do damage beyond what they’re allowed access to.

Huang also told Fortune that he’s averse to the AI doomerism in the air of late. He didn’t name names, but you can guess who he’s referring to (say, Anthropic, last valued at $965 billion in May, which been central to much of the “AI will kill us all” discourse.The company has been rumored to be preparing—and postponing—its IPO for months.) To Huang, the answer is simple: if someone believes AI is that dangerous and beyond control, they should just stop, as Kahn and Nolan write:

Huang also shrugged off warnings of existential risks from AI that have come from many within the leading AI companies, including executives such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, telling Fortune the technology was “completely in our control.”

“I don’t know why anybody would want to support the advancement of a technology that’s going to result, you know, in the end of human civilization as we know it. And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it,” he said.

My personal interpretation of Huang’s comments: He seems like a man who’s begun to lose patience, ultimately seeing the warnings as a kind of fear-mongering and—perhaps, an eschewing of responsibility.