Jensen Huang urges direct AI talks with China instead of applying restrictions

Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) CEO Jensen Huang is using the Anthropic Mythos’ viral moment to make a bigger point about China, saying the Trump administration should open a real AI channel with Beijing instead of acting like the two sides can avoid each other.

Jensen made his case during a Wednesday interview on the Dwarkesh Podcast. For Nvidia, it’s been a pretty awkward year to say the least. For all his claims of “close friendship” with Donald Trump, Jensen’s company is still caught between Washington’s chip policy and the fact that China remains too large, too deep, and too active in AI to ignore.

Jensen said, “The amount of capacity and the type of compute Mythos was trained on is abundantly available in China. So you just have to first realize that chips exist in China.”

Jensen added that China manufactures about 60% of the world’s mainstream chips.

Jensen tells Washington to talk with China because the talent, chips, and power are already there

Jensen said the United States wants to win and said China is an adversary, but he also said, “Victimizing them, turning them into an enemy, likely isn’t the best answer.”

For Jensen, it is “simply essential” for American AI researchers and Chinese AI researchers to be talking, and he said both sides should try to agree on what AI should not be used for.

He also pushed back on the idea that AI finding software flaws is itself some shock, because to him, that is what AI is supposed to do.

Jensen then turned to the security side of the industry and said not enough attention is being paid to the wider market forming around AI cybersecurity, AI security, AI privacy, and AI safety. Jensen said there is a growing startup ecosystem trying to build a world where one strong AI agent is watched by thousands of other AI agents that keep it safe and secure.

Jensen warns the United States not to split open AI from the American tech stack

Jensen said the future will not be a world where one AI system runs loose with nobody watching it, because “that would be insane.”

“We know very well that this ecosystem needs to thrive. It turns out this ecosystem needs open source. This ecosystem needs open models. They need open stacks so that all of these AI researchers and all these great computer scientists can go build AI systems that are as formidable and can keep AI safe. So one of the things that we need to make sure that we do is we keep the open source ecosystem vibrant,” said Jensen.

Jensen then linked that point to US infrastructure limits, saying he understands that Trump wants as much computing capacity as possible, but energy is still a constraint. He said people are working on that problem and that the country cannot afford to let power become a bottleneck.

At the same time, he said the United States should want AI developers around the world building on the American tech stack and sending open advances back into the American system.

What he said Washington should avoid is a split where the open source world runs on a foreign stack while the US stack becomes the home of a closed system. He said that would be “extremely foolish” and “a horrible outcome for the United States.”

Just last week, US lawmakers proposed a bill that would tighten China’s access to advanced chipmaking equipment by pushing allies such as the Netherlands and Japan to match US export controls within 150 days.

Before that, in November last year, the United States launched the Genesis Mission, a national AI effort led by the Department of Energy and 17 national labs that plans to build an integrated AI platform using federal scientific data sets to train scientific foundation models, create AI agents, test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and speed up scientific breakthroughs.

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