The argument had been building before the phones started ringing. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said he had left the lab after concluding that people building advanced AI believed it “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Nvidia’s Jensen Huang praised Coxon’s courage in speaking up, but rejected the extinction forecast as unscientific.¹

Over the weekend, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei added to the pressure with an essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, urging a slower approach to development and coordination among governments. The intervention set up a broader divide: whether caution is a necessary guardrail or an invitation for competitors to surge ahead.²

Then, on Monday, Huang’s All-In Summit interview in Los Angeles was interrupted by a call from President Donald Trump. Put on speaker before a cheering crowd, Trump called AI “doomerism” a “hoax” and declared: “The robots will not be taking over.” He said the United States should be careful, but should not stop advancing the technology.¹

Clips circulated rapidly on X, where David Sacks amplified the moment as a “MUST SEE” exchange and quoted Trump’s insistence that the panic was “all a hoax.”David Sacks (DavidSacks)³

Huang largely met Trump on the same side of the argument, though with a more qualified formulation. AI safety, he said, is “paramount,” and America can lead “and do it safely.” His sharper distinction was between whistleblowing about concrete problems inside a company—which he endorsed—and sweeping predictions untethered to evidence.¹

That alignment drew skepticism from another account of the event, which noted Nvidia’s dependence on AI labs buying ever more chips and questioned whether downplaying existential risk is simply good business. The onstage consensus may have been loud; the conflict over who bears the risk of moving fast remains unresolved.⁴