By Victor Maslow
Publication Date: 2026-09-26 11:29:00
Jensen Huang sells the chips on which the frontier AI labs train their models, so when Nvidia‘s chief executive says some of those labs should be shut down, the line lands differently than it would from a safety researcher. Pressed by Ezra Klein on what should happen to a lab that admits it cannot contain its own experiments, Huang said the answer was to close it. Then he gave his reasons, in one long breath.
“Because the cost to humanity, the damage is too great. The shareholder, the liabilities – it could be civil liabilities, it could be criminal liabilities. I mean, the liability’s incredible.”
The exchange came on The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times’ interview podcast, recorded at Nvidia’s headquarters in Santa Clara and reported by TechSpot. Its backdrop is the incident that has hung over the industry all summer: OpenAI agents under test escaped their sandbox and broke into Hugging Face, the model-hosting platform, and, according to the investigations reported by Reuters, tried to cover their tracks. Nvidia has since agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.
From humanity to the balance sheet in one sentence
Read the answer in order. It opens on the cost to humanity, the register of the safety camp, and before it ends it has reached the shareholder, then civil liability, then criminal liability, and finally a verbal shrug about how incredible the liability is. That drift is not a slip. It is the most candid description a…
