Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the AI industry should not tolerate any cybersecurity incidents caused by the technology.
'We should not accept any of them,' Huang told Fortune in an interview in London. 'We should do everything we can to avoid them.' He said the incidents seen so far could have been prevented with stronger containment and monitoring of AI agents.
Huang compared the risk to the early consumer internet, when clicking on a website could infect a PC with a virus. His answer is the same logic that eventually hardened browsers: AI agents, he said, need to be sealed inside a secure container so they cannot do damage beyond what they are allowed to do.
That puts Huang at odds with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said some hacks and scams may be a necessary trade-off for AI’s benefits. Altman recently warned of 'a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems' from rival open-source models. Huang rejected the premise of tolerating catastrophic downside as the cost of progress.
'I don’t know why anybody would want to support the advancement of a technology that’s going to result, you know, in the end of human civilization as we know it,' he said. 'And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it.' Huang also said the technology was 'completely in our control.'
The comments came as Huang toured Europe. In Paris on Tuesday, he said 'Europe needs to get in the race' on AI. He said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments within the next week, on top of the $8 billion the chipmaker has already committed to the continent. The tour also includes Berlin, where Nvidia’s GTC conference will be hosted later in the month.
Huang also said the region still trails at the frontier, but he pitched open-source models as Europe’s best route to catching up with the U.S. Nvidia is already a major backer of Mistral, the French open-weight developer that recently released its Large 4 model, trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs.
The market has already voted on where the leverage is. Nvidia’s message is that AI should not become a license for disorder, and that the fix is not panic but control, containment and clear rules. Capital rewards the companies that can build the rails, not the chaos.
