President Trump surprised the crowd at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles on September 14, 2026, when he phoned Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was mid-interview onstage, prompting Huang to put the president on speaker for the audience of thousands. During the call, Trump dismissed growing warnings about catastrophic AI risk as a "hoax," insisting robots and AI would not take over the world and that the technology's critics were playing into the hands of political rivals or China. He praised AI data centers as engines of wealth for people and states alike, calling them the "oil of the next 20, 25 years." Huang, for his part, backed the push for rapid progress and pushed back on calls to slow development, telling Trump the industry was “not going to let that happen.”

The impromptu call landed just days after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publicly urged the AI industry to deliberately slow the pace of capability advances, warning that unchecked progress could carry catastrophic risks. Trump and Huang's on-stage exchange put the two firmly on the opposite side of that debate, favoring aggressive buildout and continued U.S. dominance over caution and coordinated pauses. The moment underscored a widening rift among the industry's most powerful voices over how fast, and how safely, AI development should move. It also reinforced Trump's consistent stance since taking office that America's edge in AI is too valuable to slow down, regardless of the safety concerns being raised elsewhere in Silicon Valley.