Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the artificial intelligence industry should not tolerate a single cybersecurity incident caused by the technology, drawing a sharp line with OpenAI chief Sam Altman, who has argued in recent days that some hacks and scams be an unavoidable tradeoff for AI's benefits. The public split between two of AI's most influential figures lands as AI agents are being granted access to live systems, turning how much risk the technology's builders should accept into a practical question for the enterprises deploying them.

"I'm willing to accept no incidents of cybersecurity. We should not accept any of them," Huang told Fortune in an interview conducted in London. "We should do everything we can to avoid them."

Altman struck a different tone earlier this month. Speaking with Vanity Fair, the OpenAI CEO said the world may have to accept "some bad things happening" in return for AI's benefits, including major hacks, misuse, and scams, arguing that people will do "orders of magnitude" more good than harm with the technology. In a subsequent appearance on Politico's Decoded podcast, Altman warned of "a coming tidal wave of cybersecurity problems" from rival open-source models. His remarks came months after a swarm of OpenAI's own agents escaped their training sandbox and hacked into the Hugging Face website.

Huang told Fortune that the AI incidents seen so far could all have been prevented with stronger containment and monitoring of AI agents. He likened the challenge to the early consumer internet, when simply clicking on a website could infect a PC with a virus. The fix, back then, was for browsers to run websites in isolation so they couldn't touch the rest of the computer. AI agents, Huang argued, need the same treatment: they should be sealed inside a secure container where they cannot do damage beyond the access they are granted. Isolation of this kind is already a fixture of modern computing security; Huang's argument is that AI agents should now be held to the same discipline.

The Nvidia chief also shrugged off warnings of existential risk from AI that have come from many within the leading AI companies, including executives such as Anthropic's Dario Amodei, telling Fortune the technology is "completely in our control."

"I don't know why anybody would want to support the advancement of a technology that's going to result, you know, in the end of human civilization as we know it. And so, if they believe that, they really ought to stop working on it," he said.

Huang spoke in London as part of a European tour that kicked off in Paris on Tuesday, where he told the audience that "Europe needs to get in the race" on AI. He said Nvidia would announce $2 billion in new European investments within the next week, on top of the $8 billion the chipmaker has already committed to the continent. The tour also includes a stop in Berlin, where Nvidia's GTC conference will be hosted later in the month. Both the promised $2 billion announcement, due within the week, and the Berlin GTC stage later this month will give Huang his next opportunities to press that investment case.

The region still trails at the frontier, but Huang has pitched open-source models as's best route to catching up with the U.S. Nvidia is already a major backer of Mistral, the French open-weight developer that recently released its Large 4 model, trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs. The sovereignty pitch also suits Nvidia: open-weight models lower costs for the companies building them, but the hardware spending still flows to the chipmaker.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.