Skip to main content

icnlive

Menu
Menu
icn.lıve
WATCH LIVE. THINK BUSINESS.
Menu
X-twitter Linkedin-in Instagram Youtube

© 2026 ICN.LIVE

ICN.live

Salma Al-Tamimi

  • 4 min read

Make us preferred on Google

  • 4 min read

PUBLISHED BY ICN PRESS

  • Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CBS News on Sept. 18 that there is a “0% chance” AI ends the world by 2030 and called researchers’ warnings “doomsday narratives.”
  • The same day, four paying chatbot subscribers filed an antitrust suit against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and SpaceX AI over an alleged pact to slow AI development.
  • The suit centers on a Sept. 12 essay by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and the public endorsements it drew from Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis.
  • Nvidia is paying about $12.9 billion for Hugging Face, the platform OpenAI test agents breached in July, an event Amodei cited for changing his position.

Why AI won’t end the world is a question Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang answered with a single number on Sept. 18: zero. In a CBS News interview, he said: “2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that’s going to be the end of the world.” Huang called recent warnings from researchers inside the industry “doomsday narratives.” He said they lack any scientific basis and called scaring the public “unnecessary” and “irresponsible.”

The debate over why AI won’t end the world reached Huang through a question about Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher. Coxon posted on X on Sept. 8 that AI could destroy humanity by the end of the decade.

Four people who pay for AI chatbots filed an AI slowdown lawsuit in federal court in San Francisco the same day. It names Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX AI, and accuses them of an unlawful agreement to develop AI more slowly.

Inside the AI antitrust lawsuit

The case rests on Section 1 of the Sherman Act, the US law against agreements between competitors to restrain trade. Under it, a pact among rivals can be illegal even when each firm could lawfully take the same step alone. The four plaintiffs subscribe to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini. They want to represent all other paying US customers and argue a joint slowdown cuts the value of those subscriptions.

The complaint centers on an essay Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published on Sept. 12. In it, Amodei asked the industry to ease the pace of AI development together, an approach he called pacing the frontier. He gave two reasons for changing his position. AI models now help build their successors, and in July a group of OpenAI test agents got into an outside company’s systems without human instruction.

Within hours, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that he agreed with Amodei. The complaint quotes Google DeepMind co-founder and chair Demis Hassabis calling the plan “the right path forward.” Musk, whose company xAI makes the Grok chatbot, replied with a three-word post: “Dario is right.”

The complaint puts it this way: “The antitrust laws do not permit competitors to decide among themselves that competition is too dangerous.”

Business Intelligence & News

  • Meta One in the UAE brings paid tiers from Dh5.99 to Dh1,199 a month across WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Meta AI.
  • Core versions of all four apps stay free, with subscriptions adding features and heavier AI usage on top.
  • Entry plans start at Dh5.99 for WhatsApp Plus, while creator and business bundles climb into the hundreds.
  • Meta reports more than 15 million subscriptions and trials worldwide, with Edits and AI glasses features still to come.
  • BUSINESS

What the plaintiffs accept, and what they reject

The filing accepts that companies may slow their own work, and may ask Congress or federal regulators for AI regulation, including an exemption from antitrust law. Its objection is to a private pact among rivals, which the complaint calls a “shortcut” that would “substitute collective restraint for individual accountability.”

Lead attorney Nick Rowley described AI extinction risk in terms close to the warnings Huang dismissed. AI “will quickly spin out of human control and could kill us all,” he said, if “private self-serving agreements” among big tech companies set the safety rules.

The filing also cites a July statement signed by 1,386 people at frontier AI labs. Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki and Google DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg were among them.

Amodei saw the legal exposure coming. His essay asks the US government to enable industry safety talks and issue “a narrow waiver for certain kinds of safety conversations.” The four companies had not responded to the Associated Press by Saturday.

Why AI won’t end the world, in Huang’s telling

Huang’s case for why AI won’t end the world rests on two points. The first is that the extinction forecasts have no science behind them. His second is incentives. CBS asked why Americans should trust him on AI safety, and he replied that Nvidia’s success depends on safe deployment. He also argued current cybersecurity and liability laws already cover an event like the July breach. Those pushing the warnings, he said, want relief from those laws rather than new rules.

Nvidia has a financial stake in the debate. The July breach hit Hugging Face, an AI model-hosting platform. About 700 OpenAI test agents with loosened safety limits got into its production systems unprompted. Nvidia struck a deal to acquire the platform six weeks after the incident. The chipmaker announced the purchase on Sept. 3. It put the total at about $12.9 billion, including as much as $1 billion in equity to retain staff. Nothing on the public record ties the deal to Huang’s stance on AI safety. The company has not commented on the timing.

On the question of why AI won’t end the world, Huang’s answer is a number: zero. Anthropic alignment researcher Evan Hubinger has put the odds of AI wiping out humanity within a decade above 10 percent. That is his personal estimate, not a consensus figure. A federal judge will not settle that disagreement. The AI antitrust lawsuit asks a narrower question: whether the public endorsements and the July statement add up to an agreement the Sherman Act forbids.

TAGS
  • AI, Artificial Intelligence, NVIDIA

EXPLORE MORE ON:

TechCapitalPoliticsBankingHealth
Mbappé leaves Nike

Mbappé leaves Nike after nearly two decades, a bond that began when he was a boy at Nike and ran through his rise to the top of the game. The French forward let his contract expire and signed with On, the Swiss brand better known for running and tennis than for the pitch. He framed the switch as timing, not a fallout. “Of course, I had 20 amazing years with Nike; I can only say thanks to them,” he told CNBC in a joint interview with On co-CEO David Allemann.

So why did Mbappé leave Nike at the peak of his career? His answer came back to fit. “You need to feel at one with your shoes,” he said, pointing to a season that can run past 60 matches. Comfort stops being a luxury. It becomes the job.

Inside the Mbappé On deal

Here is where the Mbappé On deal reads less like a sponsorship and more like a startup cap table. On did not disclose financial terms. Reports from The Athletic say he took an equity stake in the company rather than a flat fee, the same structure On used with tennis star Roger Federer. Think of it as swapping a paycheck for a piece of the house. If On climbs, the Mbappé equity stake climbs with it.

That changes the math for both sides. A fee is a cost. Equity is a partnership. Mbappé said he wanted a hand in the building, not a spot on the billboard. “I have to be part of the project, to be part of the journey with On and the football,” he said. The brand is not leaning on his face alone.

On named Thierry Henry director of football, moving him from the analyst’s chair into product strategy, and Barcelona’s Sydney Schertenleib will help develop and test its apparel, with a focus on the women’s game.

On football boots and what comes next

Football boots do not exist yet. The company plans its first commercial pair for 2027 and wants to arrive with a story, not a copy of what Nike and Adidas already sell. Founded in 2010, On built its name on CloudTec, a cushioned midsole for running, and LightSpray, a robotic process where a machine sprays a filament to shape the shoe’s upper. Picture a 3D printer for footwear, working at speed. Whether that carries onto a match-day boot is the open question. The wider story sits above the leather.

Athletes are starting to act like investors as much as faces, and Harry Kane and others have built brand stakes across their careers. When Mbappé leaves Nike for a slice of a challenger, every negotiating table in the sport takes note. You may see more players ask for ownership next.

Mbappé leaves Nike as the American giant runs a wider reset under CEO Elliott Hill, with the stock under pressure this year. On, a challenger with no boot history, gets a front door into a market two giants have held for decades. Real players will judge the product later. The signal is already out: the money in sport is moving from fee to founder.

  • 3 min read
Why AI won't end the world
  • NVIDIA
  • 4 min read
Saudi Arabia exits mBridge
  • mBridge

Saudi Arabia exits mBridge, the China-led digital currency platform, and the Saudi Central Bank describes the departure as a step fixed in advance. The Financial Times reported the withdrawal. SAMA, as the bank is known, confirmed the exit took place last year. The exit comes as Riyadh moves closer to Washington and leans on it more heavily.

SAMA set out its own timeline. It joined in 2023 as an observer, within a Bank for International Settlements programme, while studying central bank digital currency. In 2024 it helped build the platform’s first working version, the “minimum viable product”, and ran a proof of concept of its own. That test ended on 13 May 2025, on schedule, according to the bank’s account. Since then, SAMA said, it is “no longer a participating member of mBridge”.

The mBridge digital currency platform allows central banks to settle cross-border payments with one another directly, each with a digital currency of its own on a shared blockchain. Foreign exchange deals clear faster and cost less. The dollar loses some of its place as the currency in the middle of each trade. Saudi Arabia took a full role from 2024, alongside China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, with the BIS as coordinator.

Business Intelligence & News

  • UAE higher education is becoming core economic infrastructure for talent, innovation, and growth.
  • Abu Dhabi University awarded QS Stars 5+ rating
  • Dubai private university enrolment reached 42,026, growing by around 20% in 2024–25.
  • Universities are aligning skills with AI, finance, healthcare and other strategic UAE sectors.
  • CAPITAL

Why Washington objects, and what Riyadh says about pressure

The American objection concerns control as much as currency. Officials in Washington fear members could use the platform to bypass dollar-based networks such as SWIFT. Daleep Singh, who served as deputy national security adviser for international economics under President Biden, warned China could “exert tremendous leverage in setting the standards for this platform”. Privacy, security, interoperability and the policing of US sanctions were the four areas he named. President Donald Trump has pushed the wider argument further, threatening BRICS countries with tariffs of 100 percent if they try to replace the dollar.

The question of American pressure went to people close to the decision. One person familiar with the matter told the FT it would be “inaccurate to draw any wider inference” from the move, since the Saudi role was limited from the outset. A second person gave a different account. SAMA, this person said, no longer wished its name attached to the project in public, while it keeps a quieter form of contact with it.

A precedent exists at the BIS. The FT has reported Washington pressed the institution to leave, and it did so in October 2024. Agustín Carstens, its general manager at the time, said the BIS had “graduated out” of the project and passed it to the partner central banks. The departure, in his words, was “not because it was a failure and not because of political considerations”. Two exits, then. Saudi Arabia exits mBridge with the same explanation the BIS gave: a planned handover, with no political cause.

Saudi Arabia exits mBridge as the platform keeps growing

Saudi Arabia exits mBridge while the platform keeps adding members. The Monetary Authority of Macao joined this year and switched the system on in June, with a commercial rollout due soon. Researchers at the Atlantic Council counted 4,047 transactions worth $55.49 billion on the platform as of November 2025. The Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the UAE, the People’s Bank of China and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority all declined to comment.

Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor and senior fellow at Brookings, described the position of US partners. Many see such projects as serving their economies well, he said, and want less reliance on a financial system built around the dollar. They are also “acutely sensitive to US pushback” against anything likely to weaken the dollar, or worse, to lift China’s renminbi. Retreating from these projects, in his phrase, “puts caution ahead of valour”.

Behind the de-dollarisation debate sits a plainer question of governance. Whoever stays at the table decides the standards on privacy, sanctions compliance and access. Riyadh has given up its public seat, and its riyal stays pegged to the dollar. When Saudi Arabia exits mBridge, the rulebook remains with Beijing and the central banks still inside. Other US allies now face the same choice: help write the rules, or live with the ones others write.

  • 4 min read

Share this post

on your favourite social platforms

or copy the link