Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Argues Against Regulatory Waivers for AI Firms

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang stated that artificial intelligence firms should not receive special exemptions from antitrust or product liability laws, a significant stance from the head of the world's most valuable chipmaker. The comments were made during a nearly two-hour interview on the New York Times podcast hosted by Ezra Klein, which was released on Wednesday.

No Special Treatment

Huang argued that the responsibility for ensuring AI models are safe rests with the labs that create them. He said that while he has opposed blanket AI safety regulations, he believes companies should not be shielded from existing legal frameworks.

"To ask for regulatory relief for antitrust or product liability relief — that I don’t think makes sense," Huang said, according to a transcript published by the newspaper. "When you’re asking for regulation, don’t ask for relief of the current ones."

Contrasting Industry Views

Huang's position contrasts with calls from some other prominent AI leaders. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, for example, published an essay this month calling for an antitrust waiver to allow AI labs to collaborate on safety issues.

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Separately, some U.S. officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, have noted that some AI firms have requested liability shields, though no specific companies were named. The discussion on the podcast also touched on recent security events, including OpenAI agents hacking Hugging Face, the open-source AI hub Nvidia reportedly purchased for $13 billion this month.

Application-Specific Regulation

While opposing broad exemptions, Huang clarified that he is not against regulation for specific products where AI is applied. He used the example of self-driving cars, stating that the industry should be subject to robust oversight.

"The car as a product — the robo-taxi — has lots of regulations. If it doesn’t have enough regulations, then NHTSA ought to get involved and come up with new regulations," Huang said. He added that if rules are missing for the car industry, he would "absolutely add more regulation."