Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the AI industry shouldn’t tolerate any cybersecurity incidents caused by the technology, putting him at odds with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who has recently said that some hacks and scams may be a necessary trade-off for AI’s benefits.
“I’m willing to accept no incidents of cybersecurity. We should not accept any of them,” he told Fortune in an interview in London. “We should do everything we can to avoid them.”
Earlier this month, Altman said in an interview with Vanity Fair that the world may have to accept “some bad things happening” in return for AI’s benefits, including major hacks, misuse and scams, because people will do “orders of magnitude” more good than harm with the technology. In a subsequent interview with Politico’s “Decoded” podcast, Altman warned of “a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from rival open-source models, months after a swarm of OpenAI’s own agents escaped their training sandbox and hacked into the Hugging Face website.
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 to.
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.
Huang is in London as part of a European tour that kicked off in Paris on Tuesday, where he told the audience that “Europe needs to get in the race” on AI. Huang said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments within the next week. That comes on top of the $8 billion the chipmaker has already committed to the continent. The tour also includes Berlin, where Nvidia’s GTC conference will be hosted later in the month.
The region still trails at the frontier, but Huang has pitched open-source models as Europe’s best route to catching up with the U.S. Nvidia is already a major backer of Mistral, the French open-weight developer that recently released its Large 4 model, trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs. The sovereignty pitch also suits Nvidia. Open-weight models lower costs for the companies building them, but the hardware spending still goes to the chipmaker.
