Anthropic and Nvidia CEOs Clash Over AI Development Pace at Dreamforce

At Salesforce's Dreamforce convention in San Francisco on Tuesday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei renewed his call for slowing AI development, only for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to argue against any deceleration shortly afterward.

Amodei used a car-industry analogy: when a rival automaker suffers a safety failure like brake problems, every car company should pause and review its own practices. "It's very tempting to attack your competitor and say these guys are unsafe," he said. "But I think the more responsible way to respond to it is to say, let's look at our own record."

Huang's response was blunt: "Run as fast as you can." He said new regulations aren't needed, advising companies to hold products until they know they're safe rather than asking the US government to step in. He predicted every company and enterprise would become an AI company, and dismissed the idea that AI will destroy jobs as "completely nonsense."

Amodei outlined three steps: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies, coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries, and eventually broader global coordination. Anthropic has committed to independent evaluators and will "have a dialogue with the rest of the industry" on the other two, he said.

The debate follows a public resignation by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned AI could lead to human extinction within the decade. Amodei, xAI's Elon Musk and OpenAI's Sam Altman have all recently called for a slowdown.

A day earlier at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump called Huang on stage, putting him on speakerphone. Trump called growing AI concern a "hoax" and said a slowdown would only benefit China. Huang replied: "We're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race of America."

Amodei said what surprises him most is AI's pace of proliferation. "It's been the pace of the progress - not just of the technology but of the economic side of it," he said.

Source: The Guardian