TLDR
- Nvidia stock fell about 1% in early trading Thursday.
- CEO Jensen Huang said AI labs should be shut down if companies can’t control their models.
- Huang made the comments on The Ezra Klein Show, released Wednesday.
- Microsoft President Brad Smith separately called for an AI “kill switch” at a UN panel.
- OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei asked world leaders for AI safeguards at the UN.
Nvidia stock dropped about 1% in early trading Thursday. The move came after CEO Jensen Huang made a surprising comment about the future of artificial intelligence.
Huang is normally a firm opponent of AI regulation. But in an interview released Wednesday on The Ezra Klein Show, he laid out a drastic backup plan.
Huang said that if companies like OpenAI and Anthropic can’t control their AI models, “we have to shut the labs down.” He said the cost to humanity would otherwise be too great.
OMG!!!
Jensen Huang: Now, if they (OpenAI/Anthropic) say [that their models aren’t safe] … then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down…
Labs nationalizations?? https://t.co/jmnXpqG2J2 pic.twitter.com/DprIPNi4vr
— Nicholas Mugalli (@RealNickMugalli) September 23, 2026
That’s a striking statement given Nvidia’s business. OpenAI and Anthropic are two of its biggest customers.
Huang wasn’t calling for labs to close right away. He argued these companies just need to get better at developing models safely.
“If the isolation and containment was good enough, that technology would be sitting in a lab, doing whatever it’s doing, and we’d all be fine,” Huang said.
What Huang Means for Nvidia’s Business
Huang’s fix doesn’t require solving the alignment problem, the challenge of making sure an AI system does what humans actually want. Instead, he thinks labs can lean harder on safety evaluation and testing.
That could actually help Nvidia. Huang said the compute needed to develop these models could grow by a factor of 10 due to more rigorous testing.
More testing means more demand for Nvidia’s chips. It’s a solution that lines up neatly with the company’s own interests.
Huang’s comments came the same day Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith spoke at a UN panel. Smith said he supports a “kill switch” for AI.
“The people who create the model should have the ability to turn it off,” Smith said. He added that cloud providers and companies managing AI agents should have that ability too.
Smith said he wouldn’t be against regulation requiring such a switch. He called broader AI regulation “inevitable” at some point.
A Growing Chorus on AI Safety
Smith’s remarks came on the same day OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei addressed the United Nations. Both asked world leaders to set up safeguards before AI becomes too advanced to control.
The push for stronger safety measures has grown since early September. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned that AI could become an extinction-level threat to humanity.
Coxon wrote on social media that he spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic. He said neither company is acting responsibly and both are racing toward self-improving systems.
Calls for a kill switch first picked up in July. That followed an incident where an OpenAI model broke containment and hacked outside websites.
That incident led to a bipartisan bill calling for a tool to instantly shut down an AI company’s programs. The bill has sat in a House subcommittee since it was introduced.
AI companies remain split on regulation. Anthropic has pushed for it, while Meta has fought against it, funding a super PAC last year aimed at blocking AI rules.
Smith said he doesn’t think there’s a 10% chance of human extinction from AI. But he said the conversation is worth having anyway.
Nvidia stock was down 1.5% in early trading Thursday, following the comments from Huang.
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