Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has sharply rejected Anthropic's proposal for an antitrust waiver that would let AI companies coordinate on safety efforts without running afoul of competition law, calling the idea "completely unnecessary" in a CNBC interview broadcast Tuesday.
"The fact that we need new laws, new antitrust laws, or new regulations, so that these companies could do their fundamental engineering and do it properly before they release products — that is just completely unnecessary," Huang said on CNBC's "Mad Money," according to CNBC. "We have plenty of laws. We have plenty of regulations that govern the reliability and the functionality of products."
The comments put the world's most valuable chipmaker squarely against the most consequential governance idea to emerge from the frontier labs' safety debate — and extend a public feud that has been building all week. For more context on this story, see our ongoing latest AI developments.
What Anthropic Actually Proposed
The waiver idea came from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. In his September 12 essay calling on the industry to pace frontier development, Amodei acknowledged an awkward legal reality: some forms of coordination between rival labs — sharing safety evaluations, comparing internal test results, agreeing on capability thresholds — sit close to conduct that antitrust law traditionally treats as collusion. His proposed fix was narrow: the US government should mediate, or issue a limited waiver, so that safety conversations between competitors are clearly legal.
Days later, The Information and then Bloomberg, Reuters and TechCrunch reported that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind had been in talks for weeks on coordinating AI safety efforts — talks OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane confirmed on Tuesday, adding that OpenAI supports legislation to open frontier labs to independent verification organizations.
In other words, the coordination Amodei worried about is already happening. Whether it needs legal cover is now the question splitting the industry.
Huang's Argument: Existing Law Is Enough
Huang's counterposition is that no carve-out is required, because current law does not stand in the way of responsible engineering. On his reading, the waiver framing gets the problem backwards: labs do not need permission from competition regulators to test their models carefully before release — they need to do the engineering, under the same product-reliability rules that govern every other industry.
It is a view with obvious business logic behind it. Nvidia supplies the majority of the GPUs training large language models, and anything that slows the frontier — coordinated pauses, pacing commitments, capability thresholds that gate releases — slows demand for its chips. Huang has consistently rejected the slowdown framing. At Dreamforce on Monday, he told Salesforce chief Marc Benioff that speed versus safety is "a false choice" and that the industry "could definitely have both at the same time," CNBC reported.
He is not alone in pushing back. PCMag reported that Nvidia's and Meta's CEOs have both argued against Anthropic's slowdown plan, with Mark Zuckerberg joining the case for continued rapid development. The lineup matters: the two companies with the most capital deployed against fast AI progress — one selling the compute, one spending it — are now the public face of opposition to the labs' proposed self-governance regime.
The Split That Defines the Policy Debate
The dispute lands in Washington at a delicate moment. Congress has shown little appetite for new AI legislation, leaving the labs to negotiate governance among themselves — precisely the arrangement critics warn about. A viral open letter responding to Amodei's essay argued that industry coordination on safety rules amounts to regulatory capture: "All of it gets written with the help of the current frontier labs, because nobody else understands the technical details well enough to write it."
Huang's intervention adds a second, sharper worry for the waiver's backers: even if the government granted one, the appearance of the industry's dominant supplier endorsing a cartel-adjacent arrangement among its biggest customers would draw instant antitrust scrutiny. The FTC has previously signaled, through former chair Lina Khan's public comments, that there is no AI exemption from existing law — a position Huang now oddly shares, though for opposite reasons.
What Happens Next
Nothing about Tuesday's exchange changes the facts on the ground: the three largest US labs are talking, OpenAI has endorsed independent verification, and no waiver request has formally reached regulators. What it changes is the politics. A safety-coordination pact presented as industry consensus now has the industry's most important supplier publicly disputing its premise.
For Anthropic, the path forward may run through Congress anyway — the FRONTIER Act provisions OpenAI endorsed would authorize independent audits by statute, no antitrust creativity required. For Huang, the calculation is simpler: the fewer pacing commitments the frontier makes, the more GPUs it buys.
The unlikely agreement between a chip monopolist and antitrust hawks — existing laws are enough — may prove the week's most consequential irony.
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