Monday night at the All-In summit in Los Angeles, Jensen Huang got a phone call in the middle of an on-stage interview. He put it on speaker for the whole room — and the caller was Donald Trump.
Two days earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had published an essay urging AI companies to slow the pace at which they push model capabilities forward. His argument centered on recursive self-improvement — the point where a model starts accelerating its own development faster than anyone can verify it's safe — plus a recent incident involving AI agents that he said showed the industry is closer to trouble than it realizes. OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk both said publicly they agreed.
Trump doesn't buy it. "This plays right into the hands of people who don't want us to succeed. Could be political people. Could be China. We're not going to let that happen. It's a hoax," he told Huang over the phone, drawing applause from the crowd. Huang agreed on the spot: "You're right. We're not going to let that happen, sir." Trump added that the industry needs to move carefully — but stopping it isn't on the table.
Public opinion doesn't quite match the White House's stance here. A recent Gallup poll found roughly 70% of Americans don't want new data centers built near where they live, with more than half citing environmental concerns as the main reason. The split now runs deeper than regulators versus industry — it's inside the industry itself. Anthropic is asking for the brakes. Nvidia is flooring the gas. And the president just picked a side.
