Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang took a call from President Donald Trump while onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday, then held the phone to a microphone so the audience could hear it live. Video of the call circulated widely online, and it covered the growing debate over whether AI development should slow down.
Huang and the summit’s hosts had been discussing Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s public call, made the previous weekend, to “slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI,” a position OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Tesla’s Elon Musk had both said they agreed with. Trump dismissed the concern outright. “They’re just playing right in the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen,” he told Huang, adding that the sentiment could be coming from “political people” or China, and calling it “a hoax.” Huang replied, “You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir,” to applause from the crowd.
Trump’s framing echoes Y Combinator’s Garry Tan, who has suggested opposition to data centre construction is coordinated to slow American growth. Polling tells a plainer story: Gallup data shows seven in ten Americans oppose data centres near them, over half citing strain on environmental resources and about a fifth citing cost of living.
Trump did add a caveat, telling Huang “we have to do things and we have to do them prudently,” without saying what that would mean in practice. Days after Anthropic and OpenAI floated the idea of an industry safety standards body, the country’s most powerful backer of AI infrastructure has now said publicly that the safety debate itself is the thing to be suspicious of, and offered no policy to reconcile the two.
