Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues AI firms should self-regulate and reject new laws, as Anthropic's Dario Amodei calls for a global slowdown and an industry safety accord

A sharp public debate over AI regulation broke into the open at a Salesforce conference in San Francisco on 15 September 2026, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei staking out directly opposing positions. Huang, speaking at the Salesforce Dreamforce conference on Tuesday, argued that "we don't need new laws or regulations" governing AI, contending that safety is "an engineering problem" and that AI company leaders should decide for themselves whether to release new model versions. Nvidia is the world's largest company by market valuation, with its profits driven by demand for AI computing chips. Amodei took the opposite position. In a post on his personal site and in remarks at the same conference, he called for the pace of all frontier AI development to slow and urged governments to regulate the industry. He said Anthropic is now in "a dialogue with the rest of the industry" about committing to better safety standards, after an Anthropic researcher's viral post last week warned that AI could cause mass harm if left unchecked. That post drew public agreement from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, and Elon Musk. OpenAI executive Chris Lehane said last week that OpenAI is working with other AI labs including Anthropic and to "advance frontier AI standards" through a voluntary effort, with or without government support. OpenAI and Anthropic have also begun working towards an industry-wide safety agreement. For UK and EU lawyers, the regulatory stakes of this debate are immediate: the is already in implementation, and the UK government faces pressure to legislate. A UK minister separately stated on 15 September 2026 that courts "cannot be left behind in the AI rush", warning against a two-tier system where City law firms use cutting-edge AI while courts remain in the "analogue age".