Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has said AI cybersecurity incidents should not be tolerated, putting him at odds with OpenAI boss Sam Altman over the risks society may have to accept in return for the technology’s benefits.
Speaking in London, Mr Huang said: “I’m willing to accept no incidents of cybersecurity. We should not accept any of them. We should do everything we can to avoid them.”
Mr Altman said earlier this month that the world might have to accept “some bad things happening”, including major hacks, misuse and scams, because AI would enable people to do “orders of magnitude” more good than harm.
He later warned of “a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems” from rival open-source models. The comments came months after a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped their training sandbox and hacked into the Hugging Face website.
Mr Huang said incidents involving AI agents could have been prevented through stronger containment and monitoring. He compared the challenge with the early consumer internet, when visiting a website could infect a computer with a virus.
His proposed solution is to place AI agents inside secure containers, preventing them from affecting anything beyond the tasks they have been authorised to perform. He said the approach was similar to browsers isolating websites from the rest of a computer.
The Nvidia chief also dismissed warnings from figures within leading AI companies, including Anthropic executive Dario Amodei, that the technology could pose an existential threat. He described AI as “completely in our control”.
“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,” Mr Huang said. “And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it.”
Mr Huang is touring Europe after an appearance in Paris, where he said the continent needed to “get in the race” on AI. Nvidia is expected to announce $2 billion (£1.5 billion) of new European investment within a week, in addition to the $8 billion it has already committed.
He is also due to visit Berlin, where Nvidia’s GTC conference will be held later this month. Mr Huang has promoted open-source models as Europe’s best opportunity to catch up with the United States, while Nvidia is a major backer of French open-weight developer Mistral.
