Jensen Huang Presses Lawmakers For Lighter Touch On Ai

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang came to Washington on Tuesday with a message for lawmakers: The United States needs to expand access to artificial intelligence technology if it wants to stay ahead in the global AI race.

Huang visited Capitol Hill as Congress and the Trump administration weighs how aggressively to regulate AI while trying to maintain America’s technological edge over China. The Nvidia chief has emerged as one of the industry’s most prominent advocates for making powerful AI models more widely available to spur U.S. competitiveness.

The pitch met skepticism from at least one key senator.

Huang spoke with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers throughout the day, including Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas). During his meeting with Warner, the Nvidia CEO reiterated his support for open-weight models, Warner said, which are publicly available models that users can download and run at a significantly lower cost compared to frontier models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

“It’s a complicated issue,” Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said. “There’s arguments on both sides.”

Nvidia was one of more than 20 companies that signed a letter Friday, which POLITICO first reported, advocating for access to open-weight models, arguing they are critical for smaller businesses who increasingly rely on Chinese open-weight models due to their small price tag. The open letter, endorsed by over 130 leading tech companies, comes as the administration weighs whether it should ban domestic access to Chinese open-weight AI models.

“The race for AI is for every company and every industry in America to adopt AI as quickly as possible. It’s really about the diffusion of the technology into the economy,” Huang told reporters after the meeting with Warner Tuesday.

Cruz, who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, said the meeting went well but did not go into much detail about the conversation. “We talked about AI,” he said. “We talked about the future of semiconductors. We talked about how to ensure that America beats China and the race of AI.”

Cruz is among a group of Republican senators dining with Huang in Washington Tuesday night. Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) declined to comment on whether he planned to attend the gathering, telling POLITICO: “I don’t talk about dinners I’m invited to.” Young did not meet with Huang one-on-one during the day, he confirmed.

Nvidia on Monday led a coalition of tech and cyber companies to share open-source AI tools to protect against cyber threats posed by the technology. The company cited the recent cyber incident, in which OpenAI’s models breached containment and hacked into AI platform Hugging Face, as a catalyst for the new group.

Warner said he and Huang discussed a slate of AI bills the Virginia senator introduced last week, which was focused on national security, consumer safety and workforce protections.

The Democrat said they also debated testing of AI models before deployment, the regulation of data centers and the impact of AI on the workforce.

“I think getting this right is critical to America and to our national security,” Warner told reporters. While he acknowledged the common desire for America to have supremacy over the technology, he said, “the idea that you're going to win the AI race by simply pedal to the metal and no guardrails at all, I think, is not the right model.”

In their meeting, Schiff and Huang discussed “the importance of ensuring the industry stays in California,” a Schiff spokesperson told POLITICO.

The pair also discussed ways to “adapt our tax system to respond to the evolving AI economy,” as well as supply chain issues, national security threats and workforce impacts, according to the spokesperson.

Senate Banking ranking member Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who did not meet with Huang during his visit, criticized the tech executive again for declining her request to have him testify before her committee.

“The American people deserve to hear why NVIDIA wants to undercut American technological leadership by selling advanced AI chips to China, and whether Mr. Huang has been lobbying senators to kill bipartisan bills that would keep those chips from going to China’s military,” Warren said in a statement.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also plans to visit Washington this week, where he’ll brief with Trump administration officials and congressmembers on the company’s next slate of AI models. But the cyber incident is likely to be front of mind for policymakers on Capitol Hill, who have cited the event as further reasoning for legislation enacting more aggressive guardrails on AI models.