Nvidia boss Jensen Huang feels AI industry shouldn't tolerate cybersecurity incidents
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has rejected the idea that cybersecurity breaches are an unavoidable cost of AI development, arguing that stronger containment and monitoring should prevent AI agents from causing harm.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has said the artificial intelligence industry should not tolerate cybersecurity incidents caused by AI, putting him at odds with OpenAI boss Sam Altman over how much risk should be accepted as the technology develops.
Huang told Fortune in an interview in London: "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."
Altman has taken a more permissive position.
Earlier this month, he said the world may need to accept "some bad things happening" in return for AI’s benefits, including hacks, misuse and scams.
The OpenAI chief argued that people could ultimately do "orders of magnitude" more good than harm with the technology. He has also warned of a "coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems" from rival open-source AI models.
Huang said the AI incidents seen so far could have been prevented through better safeguards.
He compared the situation with the early internet, when visiting a malicious website could infect a computer with a virus.
The solution was to isolate websites within browsers so they could not access the wider computer, Huang said.
He believes AI agents should be treated similarly, operating inside secure containers that restrict what they can access and prevent them from causing damage beyond their authorised tasks.
Huang also rejected warnings from some AI industry figures that increasingly powerful systems could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Asked about such concerns, including those expressed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Huang said AI was "completely in our control".
He said: "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 civilisation as we know it.
"And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it."
Huang made the comments during a European tour that began in Paris and continued in London, with a visit to Berlin also planned.
He said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments, adding to the $8 billion already committed to the continent.
Huang has argued that open-source AI models could give Europe a route to compete with the US at the technological frontier.
Nvidia is already a major backer of French AI developer Mistral, whose open-weight models rely on Nvidia hardware.
