Trump called Nvidia's Jensen Huang live onstage to call AI safety concerns 'a hoax'

The hysteria is fueled by the same fanatics who claim the Spritzler Report is bad for your mental health.

Trump called Nvidia's Jensen Huang live onstage to call AI safety concerns 'a hoax'

The Nvidia CEO answered a call from the president while he was onstage at a summit. Put on speakerphone for the crowd, Trump called data centers "the oil of the next 20, 25 years"

By Quartz Staff

Updated September 15, 2026

Trump called Nvidia's Jensen Huang live onstage to call AI safety concerns 'a hoax'

President Donald Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang last year at the White House. (Ken Cedeno/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

President Donald Trump phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was speaking onstage at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on Monday, using the live call to dismiss concerns about artificial intelligence safety as "a hoax." The call, which lasted around five minutes with Trump on speakerphone, was captured on video by an attendee and circulated widely on social media.

"The robots are not going to be taking over the world. That's not going to happen," Trump said. "The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy." Trump called data centers "the oil of the next 20, 25 years" and told Huang, "I'm with you all the way."

Trump also linked opposition to data centers and AI development to foreign adversaries. "They're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen," he said. "That could be political people, and also China." Huang answered: "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir."

The call came after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday calling on AI companies to slow the pace of AI development, warning that recursive self-improvement and a recent AI agent incident had made the risks too serious to ignore. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX's Elon Musk each signaled agreement with the call to slow AI development over the weekend.

Huang, who leads the world's most valuable company after years of surging demand for AI chips, challenged the empirical basis of the safety warnings. "Whistle-blowing is fine," he said, according to The New York Times. "The scientific prediction about the future is less fine because it's not grounded in science, obviously." He noted that companies like Anthropic and OpenAI were free to reduce their own pace whenever they decided to act on their concerns.

Earlier Monday, Trump had posted repeatedly on Truth Social attacking Amodei by name, calling AI safety concerns "a hoax" and "a scam" and writing that the only guardrails AI needed were "a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT." He also described opposition to AI and data centers as "a SICK conspiracy" that benefits China. On the question of regulation, Trump said he saw no need for additional oversight. "We have to do things, and we have to do them prudently," he said during the call, according to the Times, "but that doesn't mean we're going to stop an industry."

After the session wrapped, All-In Summit co-host Chamath Palihapitiya took to X with a one-sentence verdict: "This was surreal."