Jensen Huang Rejects AI Existential Risk Warnings From Anthropic CEO

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has drawn a sharp line between his company’s role in building the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and the apocalyptic warnings increasingly voiced by some of the industry’s most prominent developers. Dismissing concerns that advanced AI poses an existential threat to humanity, Huang asserted the technology remains firmly under human direction.

“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,” Huang said during an interview with Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn and Bea Nolan. “And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it.” He characterized the systems currently being deployed as “completely in our control.”

The remarks place the leader of the world’s most valuable chipmaker in direct philosophical opposition to executives at leading AI laboratories who have spent recent years urging governments to regulate the very models they are racing to build. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been among the most vocal proponents of treating frontier AI development as a potential catastrophic risk, arguing that future systems could escape human oversight or be weaponized at scale. By suggesting that developers harboring such fears should abandon their work entirely, Huang effectively challenged the foundational premise of the AI safety movement that has driven regulatory proposals in Washington and Brussels.

Nvidia’s financial incentives align closely with rapid, unencumbered expansion. The Santa Clara-based company dominates the market for graphics processing units required to train large language models, generating tens of billions of dollars in quarterly revenue from hyperscalers and sovereign wealth funds racing to secure compute capacity. Any regulatory framework built around existential risk mitigation—such as mandatory pre-deployment testing, compute caps, or licensing regimes—could directly constrain demand for Nvidia’s Hopper and Blackwell architectures.

This ideological divide arrives during a period of severe turbulence across global technology markets. A broad selloff hammered semiconductor stocks and major indices over the past 24 hours, exposing deep fragility in investor sentiment despite strong underlying corporate performance. South Korea’s tech-heavy KOSPI index plummeted 7.57%, triggering circuit breakers that temporarily halted trading in Seoul. Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 4.90%.

U.S. markets braced for continued losses, with Nasdaq futures sliding 1.03% ahead of the New York open and S&P 500 futures down 0.24% following a 1.11% decline in the previous session. Shares of CoreWeave, a major cloud provider heavily reliant on Nvidia hardware, cratered more than 15% before losing additional ground overnight. Oracle fell nearly 9%.

The indiscriminate nature of the selling stood in stark contrast to sector fundamentals. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., which fabricates the advanced silicon designed by Nvidia, Apple, and AMD, reported third-quarter earnings that exceeded Wall Street expectations. TSMC also raised its capital expenditure guidance for the next two years, signaling sustained manufacturing demand even as public market valuations contracted. Apple closed at a record high, becoming only the second publicly traded company after Nvidia to reach a $5 trillion market capitalization.

Anthropic separately disclosed that it had reached profitability on an adjusted basis, though its $17 billion in third-quarter revenue suggested a slower growth trajectory than earlier projections indicated. An early backer of the startup recently forecast a post-IPO valuation potentially reaching $2.4 trillion.

Volatility bled aggressively into fixed income. The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury swung wildly between 5.32% and 5.08%, an unusually wide fluctuation reflecting conflicting investor impulses over whether government debt represented a safe haven or carried mounting inflation risk. Brent crude oil traded at $106 per barrel, while Bitcoin retreated to $81,265.

Huang’s dismissal of existential risk reflects a broader historical pattern in the semiconductor industry, where hardware architects have traditionally viewed software capabilities as bounded by physical engineering limits rather than autonomous agency. Yet the debate carries immediate policy consequences. Federal agencies and congressional committees currently weighing AI governance frameworks must navigate the competing narratives of developers warning of unprecedented danger and infrastructure providers insisting current systems pose no such threat.

European indices showed mixed reactions to the global tech rout, with the Stoxx 600 dipping slightly while London’s FTSE 100 edged higher. Meanwhile, China’s CSI 300 fell 1.23% and India’s Nifty 50 gained 1.68%.