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The scaffolding that’s built around an AI model is just as important — if not more important — for AI safety than the model itself, Nvidia’s VP of agentic AI told Semafor.
“Rather than creating fear and FUD, let’s just secure it. We know how. We’ve done these things before,” Adel El Hallak said, referencing the acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt.
El Hallak’s argument provides insight into the more technical case — as opposed to the geopolitical or ideological ones — for why AI doomerism may be overblown.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has emerged as the most prominent tech figure voicing skepticism about recent claims by leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that AI labs should slow down model development because the tech is quickly advancing beyond companies’ abilities to safeguard it. AI agents are central to that fear because they can take actions on their own, though regulation of agentic AI specifically is not discussed as much as is broad oversight of the models.
Huang this week rejected the notion that the industry has to choose between safety and speed, saying “you could definitely have both at the same time.”
El Hallak said advances in AI models make “harness engineering” more critical — a harness is the layer of instructions and code that governs how an AI agent operates in practice.
“If you’re training a capable agent, it is important that you don’t put a lion in and expect to be able to control it in a horse’s pen.”
He couldn’t comment on whether government regulation of the agentic layer is needed, but pointed to industry initiatives like the Open Secure AI Alliance as a venue for that kind of work, to figure out “at which part of the layer do we need to add more strengths and more guardrails and more safeguards.”
“The world’s not going to slow down.”
Room for Disagreement
Some in Washington argue tech companies can’t be trusted to take up these issues on their own.
“This is not an industry that can regulate itself,” Democratic Rep. Pete Aguilar said this week, arguing for the need for federal industry-wide rules on AI safety.