Trump Calls Jensen Huang Live to Denounce AI Scam Theory
U.S. President Trump called NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang during his interview at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, switching to speaker mode so the audience could hear the president's voice directly.
After the call connected, Trump joked, teasing Huang about being able to create the world's strongest AI chip but not knowing how to switch him to speaker mode, which drew laughter from the audience. He then shifted the conversation to the current hot topic of AI risk theories.
Trump clearly stated on the call that robots will not take over the world, and the doomsday rhetoric about AI destroying humanity is purely a "scam." He warned that if the U.S. chooses to slow down AI development, it will only benefit China. He also mentioned that the construction of data centers has revitalized economically depressed communities, and the influence of AI surpasses that of the internet. Those opposing data center construction are playing into the hands of forces that "do not want America to win," which could be politicians or China.
The context of this call is that two days prior, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a nearly 4,000-word article titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling for the entire AI industry to voluntarily slow down its capability enhancement speed to allow time for safety research. Following the article's release, OpenAI's Sam Altman publicly agreed, and Elon Musk responded with three words: "Dario is right," leading to a noticeable shift in industry discourse towards "hitting the brakes."
Trump clearly disagreed with this "slow down" sentiment. That morning, he first posted a rebuttal on his social media platform Truth Social, and then directly called into Huang's interview, interpreted as a targeted counter to Dario Amodei's "slow the frontier" initiative. During the call, Huang fully supported the president's statements, responding, "You are right, we will not let that happen. We will ensure that America wins in the AI race, in every industry, every company, every state, and for every person."
Mechanically, this is a politically charged statement closely tied to industrial interests—Trump, as the current president with control over tariffs, export controls, and industrial policy tools, publicly supports the "AI acceleration camp," directly benefiting chip and cloud computing companies like NVIDIA that rely on ongoing investments in AI infrastructure. Huang's full agreement during the call also serves to maintain NVIDIA's policy communication relationship with the White House, avoiding the company being caught up in the potential policy uncertainties of "AI risk regulation." In contrast, the camp represented by Anthropic, advocating for "slowing down the frontier," is clearly positioned against the president's public statements and may face greater resistance in policy lobbying in the short term.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Dario Amodei was one of the early core researchers at OpenAI, and in 2021, he left with some core members to establish Anthropic due to differences in AI safety philosophy with the OpenAI team. Since then, he has competed with OpenAI by emphasizing a "greater focus on AI safety." His recent article "We Must Pace the Frontier" calls for the industry to slow down, continuing his long-held safety-first stance since founding Anthropic.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has consistently directed capital and industrial policy resources towards accelerating AI infrastructure development through large-scale data center investment plans like "Stargate," easing semiconductor export controls, and rescinding AI regulatory executive orders from the Biden era. NVIDIA, under Huang's leadership, is one of the biggest direct beneficiaries of this acceleration path, continuously binding GPU sales and cloud service collaborations with nearly all leading AI labs, including OpenAI, xAI, and Meta. Huang's full support of the president's statements during the call aligns with his interests in maintaining NVIDIA's core position in the U.S. AI industrial policy framework.
This public confrontation over "acceleration vs. deceleration" resembles the historical split among scientists during the early development of nuclear energy, where physicists advocated for pausing research while the military and government pushed for acceleration. It also aligns with the logic of the Cold War-era U.S.-Soviet space race, where some scientists worried about arms control while the government insisted on not letting the opponent gain an advantage. The current AI industry is at a critical juncture, openly confronting the "safety camp" (represented by Anthropic) and the "acceleration camp" (represented by NVIDIA, the White House, and some OpenAI executives) for dominance over industrial policy.
Essentially, this is a positioning within the game of regulatory change—using national competition narratives, the president directly intervenes in the AI deceleration debate, redefining "whether to slow down AI development" as a national security issue of "whether to hand over the leading position to China." The mechanism is that once a technology is elevated to a core variable of great power competition, calls for self-restraint based on safety considerations within the industry will be reframed by political leaders as positions that could harm national interests, thereby using the president's public statements and the industry's giants' immediate support to compress the discourse space of the "deceleration camp" in policy lobbying.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- A single phone call can define industry debate as national stance.
- Whoever controls industrial policy can sentence risk discourse to death.
- Decelerators always face the same counter-question: What about the opponent?