US President Donald Trump made an unexpected appearance at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on September 14, by phone, calling Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while the chip executive was speaking onstage and dismissing concerns about the dangers of artificial intelligence as a “hoax.”
Huang answered the call during the live panel and put Trump on speakerphone, allowing several thousand people at the event to hear the conversation. The exchange came as Silicon Valley is increasingly divided over whether the development of increasingly powerful AI systems should be slowed down over safety concerns.
Trump argued that efforts to slow AI development could play into the hands of political opponents or China, while praising the economic potential of the data centres needed to power the technology.
“They’re just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don’t want to see it happen,” Trump said. “That could be political people. It could also be China. And we’re not going to let that happen. It’s a hoax.”
Huang immediately agreed.
MUST SEE: Amazing moment as President Trump calls Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while he’s on stage at the All-In Summit.@POTUS on AI Doomerism: “I’m telling you, it’s all a hoax… and we’re not going to let that happen.” pic.twitter.com/ZP8cCaSMqG
— The All-In Podcast (@theallinpod) September 14, 2026
“You’re right. We’re not going to let that happen, sir,” the Nvidia CEO replied, as the audience applauded.
Trump also dismissed fears that AI could eventually become uncontrollable.
“The robots will not be taking over,” he said, according to a transcript of the call. “The AI will not be taking over the rest of the world. The whole thing is a hoax.”
The intervention came at a particularly heated moment in the AI safety debate.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published a lengthy essay calling for the industry to “slow the pace” at which it develops increasingly capable AI systems. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk subsequently expressed support for the idea of pacing frontier AI development.
The debate intensified following the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who reportedly warned that companies including Anthropic and OpenAI were “gambling with our lives” in their pursuit of increasingly powerful AI.
Despite his agreement with Trump on the broader question of whether AI development should continue at speed, Huang struck a somewhat more nuanced tone during the panel.
Read more: How Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Saved a 600-Year-Old Hawaiian Fishpond
He praised Coxon for having the courage to speak out and said whistleblowers should be taken seriously within AI companies. Huang also argued that concerns about AI safety should not create a false choice between technological progress and responsible development.
“If a company feels like they’re out of control, then maybe they should pause,” Huang said, while rejecting predictions that AI could bring about humanity’s destruction as being unsupported by science.
For Huang, however, slowing the broader AI industry is a different matter.
Nvidia has become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI infrastructure boom, with its GPUs powering many of the world’s leading AI models. The company therefore has a substantial commercial interest in continued investment in AI infrastructure.
Trump has likewise emerged as a major advocate for expanding US AI infrastructure, including data centres. During his call with Huang, he described data centres as “the oil of the next 20, 25 years” and said the industry was “bigger than the internet.”
Read more: Chinese Robots Smash Human 100M and 400M Records at Beijing Humanoid Games
The unusual exchange captured the widening divide over AI’s future: some of the industry’s most prominent figures are calling for greater caution as AI capabilities advance, while Trump and Huang are arguing that America needs to keep moving quickly to maintain its lead over China.
