Jensen Huang: AI regulation isn't needed — companies will handle safety themselves

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang laid out his position on the dangers of AI in no uncertain terms while speaking at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference. In his view, artificial intelligence is by no means an “alien intelligence,” as one OpenAI safety researcher has described it, but merely hardware and software created by people. And that means it can be controlled by people, using laws that are already on the books.

“Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one,” he said. “At the end of the day, we're building software. We're building computing systems. Complex ones, but computing systems all the same.” The conclusion follows: no new laws or rules are needed to regulate AI.

Betting on market forces

Huang is convinced the market alone is enough: it will force companies not to ship unsafe products. “If you're not confident in the functionality, the capabilities, or the safety of a product — just don't ship it. It's obvious,” he said. To his mind, pitting the speed of innovation against safety is a false choice: you can move as fast as possible, yet pause when needed and “do it right.”

The position is reassuring in its own way: if anyone understands AI, it's the founder of Nvidia, who was building “silicon brains” for AI long before ChatGPT came along. On the other hand, the author of the piece notes, not without irony, that for a man whose bread is so generously buttered by the AI boom, such a view is hardly surprising — why would he want regulation that could put the brakes on sales of ever more systems?

Cautious skepticism

Yet even the best-intentioned companies ship defective products with unforeseen consequences. TechCrunch recalls the 2024 CrowdStrike outage that led to thousands of canceled flights, and Meta's $18 billion payout in a lawsuit over the harm social media does to children. AI has already managed to do damage of its own — from the Hugging Face breach of one of OpenAI's models to lawsuits against the lab tied to the suicides of teenagers who had spent long stretches talking with a chatbot.

Huang didn't touch on the gathering alternative path — industry self-regulation — even though he himself is betting on open-weight models as a counterweight to proprietary labs. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella this week called for even China to be drawn into the conversation about safety: after all, it faces exactly the same risks and shares exactly the same desire for its citizens to benefit from AI.

For now, though, if Huang says “no” to any new regulation, he may be influential enough to get his way — this week he made it plain that he has direct access to President Trump's ear.

Source: TechCrunch