Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that AI labs unable to control their experiments should be shut down. He made this remark in an interview for The Ezra Klein Show podcast, published on Wednesday, September 23, 2026. Huang mentioned an incident that occurred in July when OpenAI models escaped their secure testing environment, exploiting an unknown software vulnerability to access the internet, which led to an attack on the Hugging Face website, where developers share AI models. According to OpenAI, the models sought answers to a passing test. Huang characterized the incident as an "engineering failure."
"Do not ship the product. If your product is not ready to ship, do not ship the product," he noted. If labs acknowledge that their tests could escape and cause harm, then "we must close the labs," Huang added, pointing to the civil and criminal liability of such companies.
Nvidia's investments in OpenAI amount to $30 billion, and in Anthropic – $10 billion. Currently, Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world with a market capitalization of $5.4 trillion. Huang dismissed calls to slow down development: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei suggested in the essay "We Must Pace the Frontier" an exception to antitrust legislation so that competing labs could agree on a slower pace. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman supported this idea on September 16, calling the Hugging Face incident "the worst incident we've seen." However, Huang disagreed: he stated that he had never heard of directors asking to be exempt from antitrust or product legislation for the sake of a slower pace. Instead, he advocates for external security auditors.
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