Trump calls Jensen Huang live on stage and dismisses AI fears as a hoax

A presidential call, live on stage

Jensen Huang's appearance at the All-In conference in Los Angeles on Monday took an unexpected turn when he was handed a foldable phone and took a call from President Trump in front of the audience, TechCrunch reports. Dressed in his signature alligator leather jacket, the Nvidia chief answered and put the president on speaker.

The report arrived with an unusual correction attached: TechCrunch initially identified the device as Apple's iPhone Duo, but later said it appears to be a Samsung Galaxy Fold 8, and removed the conclusions that had rested on the earlier identification.

AI fears framed as a hoax

According to TechCrunch, the conversation turned to AI safety, and the two men seemed to agree that mounting fears about the technology amount to what Trump called a "hoax." The president argued that the real winners of the AI panic are China and "political people," and that the technology is too big to deliberately slow down, describing it as "bigger than the internet." At one point in the exchange, Huang told the caller: "Did you hear that? Thousands of people are clapping."

The question of Huang's own view

TechCrunch casts doubt on whether the on-stage agreement reveals anything about Huang's actual position. As the outlet notes, there is no way to know whether he genuinely shares the president's view or simply is not in a position to say otherwise. Nvidia's business model depends largely on AI labs buying more chips, which makes downplaying existential risk the only available move for a chief executive who cares about his company's share price.

The same report supplies the market backdrop: Nvidia's stock is up 33 percent over the past year, though it fell a few percentage points on the day.

Why it matters

A live phone call from the president is striking theater, but the substance outweighs the spectacle. When the CEO of a company whose revenue depends on continued AI expansion and the US president publicly agree that safety concerns are overblown, that framing carries weight far beyond a single conference stage: it feeds into policy debates over regulation, informs investor sentiment, and colors how the public judges warnings about AI risk. Huang's commercial stake in that conversation is not incidental. As TechCrunch points out, it sits at the core of Nvidia's business model, which makes the moment as much a business alignment as a policy statement. Whatever Huang believes privately, the exchange, delivered to an applauding crowd, is now part of the public record of how Nvidia's leadership talks about the risks of the technology it sells.