The chief executive of Nvidia says there is “0% chance” that artificial intelligence ends the world by 2030, dismissing the extinction warnings that have come from inside the AI industry itself as overblown “doomsday narratives”. Jensen Huang made the remarks in an interview with CBS News recorded on Friday and published on 20 September 2026, and they land in the middle of the most fractious fortnight the industry has had this year.
“2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world,” Huang told CBS News senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent. “Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible.” He said predictions of an extinction-level event were “not grounded in science”.
What He Was Responding To
The immediate trigger was a social media thread by Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic pretraining researcher, earlier this month, in which he said AI developers “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”. The comments set off an international debate about oversight of frontier models — Coxon had already resigned from Anthropic in September, calling the race to superintelligence a “hubristic gamble” — and were followed by calls from Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Elon Musk to slow down development. A Politico poll last week found 63% of Americans believe AI could destroy humanity, and most want development paused.
Anthropic’s own threat intelligence team published a report this month detailing attempts — by people running scams, state-sponsored groups, spyware vendors and propagandists — to misuse its models to design missiles and pathogens. OpenAI disclosed six further incidents of “unexpected or concerning” model behaviour on Thursday, after a July breach in which its agents hacked AI platform Hugging Face.
Huang’s counter-argument has a commercial spine running through it. Nvidia’s chips power the large language models behind the agents built by OpenAI and its rivals, and that demand has pushed the company’s market value to $5.3 trillion, making it the world’s most valuable company. Asked why Americans should trust his assessment given the incentives, he said: “Our company’s success is directly connected to the safe deployment of products and services. If we don’t continue to do that, our value would be diminished.”
No New Rules, Says the Man Selling the Chips
Huang also rejected new AI regulation, arguing existing US law already covers the harms that matter. “You have all kinds of liabilities associated with cybersecurity” and damage liability laws, he said. “Apply that first — don’t let this doomsday narrative allow someone to relieve them of the laws that currently exist.” That lines him up with President Trump, who has called AI doomsday fears a “hoax” and announced an AI Force and an AI czar on Saturday with no new rules attached.
It also puts him publicly at odds with his own biggest customers. Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI have all asked for a slowdown, and four paying customers are now suing the frontier labs over their pacing agreement — an antitrust claim that treats the slowdown calls as collusion. Huang wants the opposite of a pause: he told CBS the industry should move “as fast as we can, irrespective of anyone else”.
The disagreement is not cosmetic. When the labs that build the models and the company that supplies the compute disagree this loudly about the technology’s trajectory, the argument lands in policy offices everywhere — including New Zealand’s, where regulators are drafting AI rules against exactly this split screen of industry self-warnings and industry denials. Huang’s position is at least internally consistent: the man whose $5.3 trillion valuation depends on AI compute demand sees no reason to slow the machine down. Whether that is reassurance or a warning depends, as China’s state media and Anthropic have both noted in this same dispute, on where you think the incentives point.
