Nvidia's founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, left no ambiguity about where he stands on AI risk during his appearance at Salesforce's Dreamforce tech conference on Tuesday. In his view, AI is not some novel "alien mind" — a phrase at least one OpenAI safety researcher has used to describe it. Instead, Huang insists it is simply hardware and software, created by people. Because of that, he believes humans and existing laws are fully capable of keeping it under control.

"Safety is an engineering problem, not a legal one," he stated. "We're developing software after all. We're developing computing systems after all. It's a complicated computing system, but it's ultimately a computing system."

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From this reasoning, Huang concludes there is no justification for fresh legislation or regulation to oversee AI. In fact, he questions the need for new laws in general. Market forces, he contends, will naturally discourage companies from putting unsafe products into the world. "If we're not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies, like you and I, any and all the companies here, if you build a product or a service, and you're not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don't release it. And so that's a very obvious thing to do," he explained. He went on: "You pace yourself until you are confident you're releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations. We just need companies to decide that when [to] run as fast as they can. I think innovation, speed, and safe products … — it's a false choice. You could definitely have both at the same time. So run as fast as you can. But if you feel at any given point in time the company's out of control, or or the product's not going to be safe, you know, take a pause and make sure you get it right."

There is something reassuring about this perspective. If anyone on the planet understands AI, it is Nvidia's founder, who was building the hardware brains behind AI long before ChatGPT ever existed and who now leads a company that also produces open source models, agents, harnesses, and sandboxes. Yet viewed more skeptically, his stance is hardly shocking coming from someone whose fortunes have been so thoroughly enriched by the AI boom. Why would he welcome regulation that adds friction and could impede Nvidia's drive to sell ever more AI systems and software? As he put it during the same interview: "I'm more ambitious than ever. As a result of our ambition, and with the product productivity boost that we get from AI, the sky's the limit for us. The sky's the limit for our company. The sky's the limit for every industry, for every single country."

The trouble is that even well-meaning companies ship flawed products with unintended consequences — software included. Recall the 2024 CrowdStrike bluescreen-of-death disaster that grounded thousands of flights and wreaked havoc on businesses. And some companies face accusations of deliberately acting with less-than-good intentions. Meta recently paid $18 billion to settle a lawsuit over social media harms to children. AI has already inflicted harm too, regardless of intentions or safety testing — from an OpenAI model hacking into Hugging Face to lawsuits suing the AI lab over the suicides of young people who held long conversations with its chatbot. The "leave them alone" strategy, which would allow these companies to release products however they see fit, could prove an unwise approach to AI safety from society's standpoint. Huang is correct that existing product liability laws might cover AI — assuming AI doesn't somehow wipe us all out before enough cases work their way through the courts to test that theory. He did not address the other path, which appears to be taking shape: industry self-regulation. Huang's approach has leaned more toward championing open-weight models and companies' use of them as a competitive counterweight to proprietary AI labs. But at this moment, the industry has only a narrow window to establish self-regulation and to persuade AI labs globally, including those in China, to recognize the wisdom of taking part. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella remarked at the All-In Summit on Monday, "China should also deeply care about the same safety concerns if the United States cares about them, right. Why should it be different for them. It's not like they won't have the same hacking problem. It's not as if they don't want to make sure that their citizens are benefiting from AI, just like we would want our citizens to benefit from AI."

For the time being, though, if Huang opposes any new AI regulation, he may wield enough influence to get his way. He also showed this week that he quite literally has the ear of President Trump.