Jensen Huang—Jensen Huang said AI labs should be shut down if they cannot guarantee their systems are safe, rejecting competitive-pressure excuses
In a New York Times 'Ezra Klein Show' interview published around September 24, 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that if frontier AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic cannot contain their AI experiments and guarantee they won't 'get out' and damage the world, 'we have to shut the labs down' because the cost to humanity and resulting civil or criminal liabilities would be too great. He rejected the argument that competitive pressure prevents labs from slowing down, saying companies have agency to choose not to launch unsafe products, and said he is not opposed to AI regulation but considers the current push a 'distraction' from applying existing law. He separately dismissed AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton's 10% estimate of AI-caused societal destruction as not grounded in science.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Safety | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | +0.572 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (medium ×1) × confidence (0.57)
Evidence (1 signal)
Tom's Hardware: Nvidia CEO says 'we have to shut the labs down' if AI experiments are unsafe
Tom's Hardware reported on Jensen Huang's New York Times 'Ezra Klein Show' interview in which he said unsafe frontier AI labs should be shut down, that competitive pressure is not an excuse, and that current AI regulatory proposals are a 'distraction' from enforcing existing law.