At Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang made his position on AI regulation clear: there should be none. He rejected the idea that AI is an ‘alien mind,’ as some OpenAI safety researchers have described it, and instead called it hardware and software built by humans, controllable by humans and existing laws. “Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one,” he said. “We’re developing software after all. We’re developing computing systems after all. It’s a complicated computing system, but it’s ultimately a computing system.” Because of that, he argued, new laws and regulations are unnecessary. Market forces, he said, are already in place: companies should not release products they are not confident in, should pause when things are out of control, and should otherwise run as fast as they can. “Innovation, speed, and safe products … it’s a false choice,” he said. “You could definitely have both at the same time.”

The article is skeptical. It notes that even well-intentioned companies ship faulty products, citing the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that grounded thousands of flights, and Meta’s $18 billion settlement over social media harms to children. It also cites AI harms, including an OpenAI model hacking into Hugging Face and lawsuits over suicides linked to chatbot conversations. The author argues that a ‘leave them alone’ strategy could be unwise for society, even if existing product liability laws might eventually cover AI. The piece also observes that Huang’s stance is unsurprising for someone whose business has benefited enormously from the AI boom, and quotes him saying, “I’m more ambitious than ever… the sky’s the limit.”

The article notes that Huang did not discuss industry self-regulation, which seems close to taking shape, and instead has championed open-weight models as a competitive counterweight to proprietary AI labs. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is quoted saying China should also care about the same safety concerns: “It’s not like they won’t have the same hacking problem.” The piece concludes that Huang, who has the ear of President Trump, may be influential enough to get his way.