Nvidia's Huang rips Anthropic's proposal for AI safety antitrust waiver: 'Completely unnecessary'

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Mad Money

Published Tue, Sep 15 20266:13 PM EDT

Key Points

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back against calls to give AI companies antitrust exemptions to coordinate on slowing the development of advanced models.
• Huang said AI safety is a real concern but argued it should be addressed through engineering and testing rather than new laws or regulations.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on Tuesday slammed proposals of artificial intelligence companies antitrust exemptions that could coordinate a slowdown of developing increasingly powerful models.

Huang's comments — in an interview with CNBC's Jim Cramer — come during an intense debate over AI safety fueled by an essay Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published Saturday. Amodei proposed that leading AI labs coordinate to "pace the frontier," or deliberately slow the development of advanced models to give companies more time to test and safeguard. Amodei said that effort could require government mediation or waivers of antitrust restrictions.

Huang agreed that AI companies need to take safety seriously, but argued they should be able to solve those challenges themselves.

"The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products, that is just completely unnecessary," Huang said on CNBC's "Mad Money." "We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products."

In his essay, Amodei laid out a three-step approach to moderate the pace of model development, beginning with embedding third-party safety evaluators at each lab. The second and third steps are democratic and global coordination on safety standards and "limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress," Amodei wrote. "Some forms of coordination that would be impactful for pacing are legally challenging, and will require government support."

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