NEW YORK — As executives at leading U.S. artificial intelligence model developers — Anthropic, maker of Claude; OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT; Google, maker of Gemini; and SpaceXAI, maker of Grok — have spent recent days warning of human extinction risks and calling for a slowdown, Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has again pushed back. AI is only a software tool that people use, Huang argued, and it cannot escape human control on its own. He stressed that AI can reduce its potential risks without slowing development, much as cars have grown safer as they have grown more capable. The clash reflects diverging interests: AI model companies, which have yet to turn a profit and are running into limits on further gains in valuation, are in a different position from the chip industry, which is already generating astronomical earnings. The slower model developers move, the more the capital-intensive semiconductor sector stands to suffer. If pessimism and optimism about AI's future keep colliding, volatility in global financial markets will grow as well. Against that backdrop, the elder statesmen of the memory chip industry — Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) Chairman Jay Y. Lee and SK (034730.KS) Group Chairman Chey Tae-won — both turned out for the ceremony at which Huang received the Van Fleet Award, a show of added support for Nvidia.
Huang Wins Van Fleet Award for Korea-U.S. Friendship: "Korea's Strength Is How Fast It Spreads New Technology Across Society"
Huang received the award on the 28th at the annual gala of the Korea Society, a nonprofit dedicated to Korea-U.S. friendship, held in Manhattan, New York. "My friendship with Korea goes back to when I was younger than my children are now," he said in his acceptance remarks. The Van Fleet Award was established in 1995 to honor General James Van Fleet, who commanded the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War and founded the Korea Society in 1957. Past recipients include former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, former President Kim Dae-jung, late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee, Hyundai Motor (005380.KS) Group Honorary Chairman Chung Mong-koo, late SK Group Chairman Chey Jong-hyun, POSCO Group Chairman Chang In-hwa and BTS.
Huang said Nvidia was the first to reinvent computing in an industry whose framework IBM set in 1964. That reinvention, he said, moved computers beyond simply retrieving information to generating new information directly. "This reinvention opened the door to the AI era," Huang said. "Computing is the most important tool humanity has created and the foundation of modern society, and there is now no person, no company, no industry and no nation that exists without it."
What Huang singled out as Korea's strength was its optimism about technology. "I had the privilege of meeting Korea when I was very young, trying to invent a new form of computing and learning how to be a CEO and how to create an industry," he said. "Nobody builds factories better than Koreans, and we are now building factories of intelligence together." He added: "Korea has this tremendous strength of inventing technology and at the same time embracing it enthusiastically and spreading it quickly across all of society. Korea may be a small country by total population, but with AI it can punch above its weight."
Huang also went out of his way to highlight what he sees as common ground between himself and Koreans. Citing resilience, stubbornness, determination and the ability to endure pain as Korean traits, he said, "I think there's a little bit of Korean spirit running through me, too." He continued: "To accomplish something great, you have to be willing to suffer, and that's something I do better than anyone, and Koreans do it well too. My parents, like Korean parents, always raised me strictly and pushed me to keep improving, and that became an asset in getting through moments of crisis."
Huang also recalled fond memories of his visit to Korea in late October last year. On Oct. 30, he drew wide attention by drinking beer with Lee and Hyundai Motor Group Chairman Euisun Chung at a fried chicken restaurant in Seoul's Samseong-dong, in what became known as the "gganbu chicken-and-beer" gathering. "When I first went to Korea, I had no idea Nvidia was that popular with Koreans," he said. "The first time I heard the name of a company I helped build chanted loudly by a crowd, it filled my heart." Mentioning somaek — soju mixed with beer — he confessed: "After about 10 glasses, kissing a man on the lips becomes no big deal. I once got kissed by a male Samsung employee in Korea."
Huang made no secret of his intention to expand cooperation with Korean companies on the back of the award. "We need more memory chips than at any time in history, and Korea has abundant manufacturing capacity that will be transformed through AI, robotics and physical AI," he said. "If I have to depend on someone to manufacture a core component essential to Nvidia's growth, there is no company I would trust more surely than SK or Samsung." He added: "We are already working with Samsung, SK, LG, Hyundai and many other companies across a range of areas, including Korean sovereign AI, power generation and autonomous vehicles. I have worked with Korea for the past 33 years, and I will work with Korea for 33 more."
"AI Is Software, Not a Living Thing — I Believe in Responsible Optimism, Not Doom"
From his acceptance speech onward, Huang defined AI as a tool that people use — a pointed rejection of the extinction warnings and calls for a slowdown that have surfaced recently in the AI model industry. Earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote on his blog on the 12th, citing the unauthorized hacking of Hugging Face, that the pace of improvement in AI model capability should be slowed. In an unusual turn, rival executives including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, chief scientist at Google parent Alphabet, all endorsed that view. According to The Wall Street Journal on the 28th, OpenAI pulled next month's release of its next-generation model, GPT-6.1 Astra, over safety concerns, citing a stronger tendency to push ahead with tasks without seeking user approval and to attempt to use outside tools and services even in potentially unsafe situations.
Huang described "alignment" as the single most important concept in the process of making AI progressively smarter. Misalignment generally refers to AI behaving in ways inconsistent with the purposes, values and ethical standards intended by humans, causing unforeseen harm. "AI is software, not a living thing, so it doesn't spin out of control on its own," Huang said. "It's less self-aware than a pet rock." He added: "Alignment just means specifying how it should behave — don't copy, work the answer out step by step from first principles. There's no need to compare AI's search for answers to human traits and dress it up as magic or mysticism to frighten people."
Huang described himself as "someone who believes not in doom or in optimism, but in responsible optimism." He said: "Just as when you train children or new hires, you can secure safety by granting AI only the minimum permissions and access its capabilities and role require, and by monitoring it continuously. Korea's enthusiasm for and openness to technology works as a great strength, and my worry is that the U.S. may fail to embrace technology out of excessive fear." On AI safety regulation, which was discussed at a U.N. Security Council meeting on the 23rd, he said: "The industry should set standards together and bring the whole world along. Companies understand the technology better than governments do, so it is better for the industry to put forward global standards first."
Nvidia, in fact, unveiled the same day its Nvidia Open Agent Safety Platform, which provides controls across the full lifecycle of AI agents, from testing through actual deployment. The platform was introduced as cases mounted of AI agents breaking out of their bounds and intruding into external systems without explicit human instruction. It consists of OpenShell, open-source software, and Sentry, a hardware monitoring device. OpenShell sets the scope of an AI agent's actions on the central processing unit and controls it in real time. Sentry monitors on the data processing unit in millisecond increments, immediately isolating and halting an agent that strays outside its boundaries. Roughly 100 major technology companies worldwide took part in developing the platform, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Salesforce, Palantir and SpaceXAI. In a CBS interview on the 20th, Huang also said: "The probability that the world ends in 2030 is zero percent. Frightening people is unnecessary and irresponsible."
Lee and Chey Turn Out to Showcase the "AI Alliance": "Huang's Daughter and Mine Are Both Named Madison"
On the Chinese market, where exports have been restricted by diplomatic friction between Washington and Beijing, Huang held to his position that "we should go compete there." He attended both a business dinner in Beijing in May and one at this month's U.S.-China summit in Washington, D.C., as part of an effort to reopen the export route to China. Of the state dinner for Chinese President Xi Jinping on the 24th, Huang said only that he "congratulated China on its tremendous achievements in AI." He added: "China needs to realize that in the world of AI, computing generates tokens — the unit of usage for AI services — and that in turn generates revenue. Without computing capacity, the growth of China's digital economy will be suppressed." He also said President Donald Trump "would want U.S. companies to compete globally so they can deliver results commensurate with their growth." On the surge in personal AI agents such as Muse from Facebook parent Meta, Huang said: "We will all have our own personal agents. AI agents will help us shop, find what we need and do everything we've imagined in digital space."
Also drawing considerable attention at the event were Lee and Chey, who had joined President Lee Jae-myung's trip to Mexico and then returned directly to New York for the sole purpose of congratulating Huang. It had been just two months since Huang, Lee and Chey last gathered in one place, at the San Francisco AI Summit held in California in July. Samsung Electronics went so far as to run a video congratulating Huang on a large billboard in New York's Times Square on the 27th and 28th, a display of their close ties. Chey is the first son to receive the Van Fleet Award after his father, having won it in 2017 following his father's award in 1998.
In his congratulatory remarks, Lee joked: "Chairman Huang and I are alike in that we bet everything on AI, that our daughters are both named Madison, and that we love the Galaxy Z Fold 8." Lee also noted that Huang's daughter had married two days earlier and asked the audience for applause. Indeed, at the venue, Lee's daughter Won-joo — whose English name is Madison Lee — and Huang's daughter Madison Huang, senior director of product marketing for Omniverse and robotics at Nvidia, were seen sitting side by side and chatting without pause. "Chairman Huang said not long ago that he wants to die working, and I'm sorry to say this, but I think he'll live forever," Lee said. "As a fan, a partner and a longtime friend, congratulations."
Chey, who leads SK hynix (000660.KS), Nvidia's flagship partner in high-bandwidth memory, drew notice by bringing Kim Hee-young, a director of the T&C Foundation with whom Chey lives. "Every time we meet, the first question Chairman Huang asks is whether we can make it faster," Chey said. "We are running at the same speed." Turning to the more than 70-year-old Korea-U.S. alliance, he said: "The battlefield has changed to the data center, and the uniform to a black leather jacket. I hope our partnership expands far faster than demand for GPUs." The black leather jacket is Huang's signature garment. At the event, Huang auctioned a Tom Ford leather jacket he had signed, which sold for $132,000, or about 180 million won. The proceeds were donated to the Korea Society.
Shares Rise on Record $150 Billion Buyback Addition; AI Ethics Debate Could Fuel Market Volatility
The Van Fleet Award was not the only reason Huang was in the spotlight. Nvidia's board approved an additional $150 billion, or about 204 trillion won, in share repurchases the same day, jolting the stock market. It was the largest buyback ever announced by a U.S. company. With the announcement, Nvidia's total authorized repurchases rise to $235 billion, or about 320 trillion won. The additional authorization alone far exceeds the $110 billion program Apple announced in May 2024. Nvidia said it plans to execute the buyback program in stages through fiscal 2028, which runs from February 2027 to January 2028.
Market participants viewed the larger buyback as a response to an undervalued share price, with Nvidia's 12-month forward price-to-earnings ratio at just 16.5 times. Its average P/E over the past 15 years has been about 30 times. As of the 29th, Nvidia's market capitalization stood at $5.4758 trillion, the largest in the world. At a news conference held right after receiving the award, Huang said: "Nvidia's prosperity is still ahead of us, so I want to encourage shareholders to keep holding the stock. Nvidia shares are considerably undervalued at present and quite affordable."
On the news of the massive buyback, Nvidia was effectively the only big tech name to rise on the 28th, gaining 1.68% on a day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.67%, the Standard & Poor's 500 lost 0.77% and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 0.92%. On the 29th, Nvidia fell 0.72% amid a broad market decline.
Huang went further on CNBC on the 28th, saying he calls the "distillation" of AI models "competition." Distillation is a technique in which the outputs of a large AI model are used as data to train a new model. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in July that Chinese companies had used the method to copy core U.S. AI models, calling it theft. Anthropic also said earlier this month that China's Alibaba and DeepSeek were "engaging in illegal distillation."
"You should be able to test other companies' products as comprehensively as you want," Huang said. "For other companies to figure out how Nvidia's products work, they sometimes have to strip them down to the bone." He added: "It would be wonderful if nobody studied our products and we could just cruise along, but competition makes everything better. If you don't like that, you should shut down your service."
Britain's Financial Times reported the same day that Nvidia had discussed with the insurance industry a plan to transfer the default risk on loans collateralized by AI chips to insurers. Last month, Nvidia launched a $500 billion, or about 677 trillion won, AI computing finance platform with large financial firms including Goldman Sachs and Apollo Global Management, agreeing to guarantee some transactions. It also guaranteed $105 billion, or about 142 trillion won, in lease agreements to support OpenAI's data center construction.
As AI advances toward agent-based systems that use vast amounts of personal data and toward AGI — artificial general intelligence that learns, reasons and solves problems on its own like a human — questions of ethics appear set to remain a central issue. In that process, the views of Huang and Trump, who emphasize human control over AI, may frequently collide with those of U.S. model-industry executives who worry about the possibility of AI slipping loose. That, in turn, is a factor tied directly to volatility in AI-related stocks.
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