Trump Calls Jensen Huang Live at All-In Summit, Dismisses AI Doomerism

Days before the call, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay arguing the industry should deliberately slow, or 'pace,' frontier AI development over safety concerns, a position that quickly drew public backing from OpenAI's Sam Altman and Tesla and SpaceX's Elon Musk ^[1]. On the All-In Podcast stage, the hosts were discussing Amodei's essay and what panelists called 'doomer psychology' when Trump's call came through - and he used the live line to declare that AI destroying humanity is 'all a hoax' ^[2]and that his administration is 'not going to let' an AI slowdown happen ^[1]. Huang echoed the rejection on air, telling the audience 'we're going to make sure that everybody wins in the AI race in America' ^[2].

Online discussion of the moment converged on a theory that helps explain why Huang, unlike the frontier labs, has little interest in slowing down: Nvidia's business is selling chips into the data-center buildout regardless of which company ultimately wins the AI race, while OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI are burning cash racing each other and stand to gain more from a mandated pause. Trump's own framing reinforced that Nvidia-aligned logic - he called data centers 'the oil of the next 20, 25 years' ^[2], telling the All-In Podcast audience they 'make people wealthy' and 'make states wealthy' independent of the underlying safety debate. He also cast opposition to that buildout as coming from 'political people' or China rather than genuine safety concern ^[1].

The call also carried a domestic political logic that has nothing to do with China or doomerism: polling cited by Fortune found 61% of Americans, and 54% of Republicans, oppose a new data center being built in their own community, while Democrats need to flip just three House seats and four Senate seats to retake Congress in the midterms ^[3]. Framed that way, Trump's warning not to 'kill the Golden Goose' reads less as a rebuttal to Amodei and more as an attempt to get skeptical voters, including his own base, to see data centers as a jobs-and-growth story rather than a local nuisance ^[3].

The episode doubles as a policy signal: Trump argued the only 'guardrail' AI needs is 'a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT' rather than formal regulation ^[3], while Vice President JD Vance separately called AI safety proposals a 'Trojan horse' ^[3]. That combination signals the administration is unlikely to pursue near-term binding federal AI safety rules, deepening a public split between the Trump-Huang position that no slowdown is needed and the Amodei-Altman-Musk position that frontier model development should be deliberately paced ^[1].