Trump and Jensen Huang right to call AI safety a hoax
By Ruth Behrens · Reporting from Newell, Iowa ·
I’ve spent my life watching people in far-off cities try to tell us how to manage the ground we stand on. Whether it’s a bureaucrat in D.C.
I’ve spent my life watching people in far-off cities try to tell us how to manage the ground we stand on. Whether it’s a bureaucrat in D.C. deciding the price of a hog or a consultant in a glass tower explaining why a seed variety isn't "sustainable," the pattern is always the same: the people writing the rules have never met a payroll, a drought, or a basis chart. Now, we have a new set of experts—the "AI doomers"—telling us to put on the brakes because the computers might eventually decide we’re obsolete.
On Monday, at the All-In Summit in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump decided he’d had enough of the caution. As reported by CNBC, the President called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang while Huang was on stage, putting the man who builds the world's most complex chips on speakerphone for the whole room to hear. Trump didn't mince words. He called the backlash to AI and data center construction a "hoax" and a "scam," labeling those who want to slow the pace "Revolutionaries for a Bad and Evil Cause." To Trump, data centers aren't a risk to be managed; they are "the oil of the next 20, 25 years."
Huang didn't hesitate. "You’re right," he told the President. "We’re not going to let that happen, sir."
The High Price of Playing Pretend
Now, there is a version of this argument that sounds reasonable if you’ve never had to worry about a mortgage or a crop failure. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently published a 3,800-word essay arguing that we must "pace the frontier" of AI development. He and others, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, suggest that the risk of existential catastrophe—the "10% extinction probability" mentioned in reports by finance.biggo.com—is too high to ignore. They want a controlled slowdown, a cautious step-by-step approach to ensure the "robots" don't take over.
It is a seductive argument for the academic class. It frames hesitation as "safety" and caution as "wisdom." But in the real world, there is no such thing as a vacuum. If we slow down our construction and our computing power because we’re afraid of a ghost in the machine, we aren't making the world safer; we are simply handing the keys to the people who aren't afraid.
We saw this same tension during the AI safety debate of 2023, where the "accelerationists" and "doomers" split the room. But safety is a luxury of the sovereign. A nation that cannot lead in the technology of its time is not sovereign; it is a vassal. Jensen Huang knows this. He’s already predicted that China will achieve advanced lithography by 2030. While the doomers are writing essays about the end of the world, Zhipu AI is raising billions for next-generation models.
A New War of Currents
This isn't the first time we've seen fear used as a weapon to protect a specific interest or slow a competitor. It is a mirror image of the War of Currents in the late 1880s. Back then, Thomas Edison tried to convince the public that alternating current (AC) was a deadly hazard to protect his own direct current (DC) systems. He used fear-mongering and public demonstrations of danger to stall a superior, more efficient technology that could transmit power over long distances. Edison wasn't worried about "safety"; he was worried about the disruption of his monopoly and the loss of control.
The "doomers" are the new Edison. By framing AI as an existential threat, they create a regulatory environment where only the biggest players—those who can afford the lawyers and the "safety" audits—can survive. It’s a strategy we’ve seen before, like the strategic alliance in the eventual merger of OpenAI and Microsoft, where massive capital and cutting-edge tech combined to scale at a pace that leaves the small player in the dust.
Trump recognizes the play. He knows that when people start talking about "safety" and "ethics" in the middle of a global race, they are often just trying to build a fence around the winners. He’s seen this movie before, from the US-China trade war of 2017 to his own volatile Tesla Inc. and Trump relationship, where the friction usually comes from someone trying to bypass a rule that doesn't make sense for the job at hand.
The Ground Doesn't Wait for Essays
The result of this alliance between the White House and Nvidia will be a scorched-earth policy toward deregulation. Trump is already frustrated that permitting issues allegedly drove Google to look at Finland for data centers. He sees the infrastructure—the concrete, the cables, the power—as the new frontier of American wealth.
The doomers will tell you that we are rushing toward a cliff. But I’d rather be on the train moving forward than standing still while the other side builds the tracks. If we let the "Revolutionaries for a Bad Cause" dictate the speed of American innovation, we will wake up in ten years to find that the "hoax" wasn't the danger of AI, but the belief that we could afford to stop.
The choice is simple: we either build the data centers and lead the race, or we listen to the people who are terrified of their own inventions and wonder why our towns are emptying and our sovereignty is gone. You don't win a race by pausing to ask if the finish line is too scary. You run.