Nvidia is investigating its own CEO over an alleged spy

Monday, November 9, 2026

Be advised: this newsletter swears, and somewhere in it is something that will offend you, whoever you are.

Today in one line: Nvidia's board is investigating Jensen Huang after he admitted an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials concluded China had recruited, and the fight worth having is over a classified warning that apparently went nowhere (cnbc.com, yahoo.com, meidasnews.com, redstate.com).

The board announced its conclusion on day one, the Secretary of State wrote a warning, and the public found out last, from a newspaper.

Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, told his staff in an email that he had an affair with a woman and that the company's board had opened an independent investigation, and the woman in question is someone U.S. intelligence officials concluded had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security (she is not related to him, a point the reporting is careful to make) (cnbc.com, yahoo.com).

His line to employees was “I was unfaithful to my wife. I am deeply sorry,” which settles the part of this that belongs to him and his family, a part I have no interest in whatsoever, and does nothing at all about the part that belongs to the rest of us (foxbusiness.com).

The board says a committee of independent directors, assisted by outside independent counsel, will oversee the inquiry, and in the very same statement says it has no reason to believe that national security or Nvidia's secrets were compromised, which is a strange thing to announce on the first day of an investigation, sort of like a referee posting the final score at kickoff and then promising to watch the game very closely (finance.yahoo.com). So let me say where I stand before going any further, because everything below is built on it: the affair is none of my business, the board's opening absolution is worth roughly nothing until someone shows the work behind it, and the actual scandal here is a memo, or more exactly the question of who read it and what, if anything, they did next.

That memo, it's worth registering, didn't reach us from Nvidia or from the government, which between them knew about it, but from a newspaper.

The New York Times reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio oversaw a classified memo warning senior Trump administration officials about Huang's relationship, and that it went to officials with high-level security clearances before Trump's May visit to China (yahoo.com, x.com). After that the reporting goes quiet in a way I find more instructive than any leak: the Times says it remains unclear whether a later decision was connected to the warning, and RedState, which nobody has ever mistaken for a house organ of the resistance, says it's unclear why the warning was apparently not acted upon (meidasnews.com, redstate.com). (China's Foreign Ministry calls the spy allegation unsubstantiated, and that U.S. officials initially did not believe Huang knew of her alleged intelligence activities, and both deserve the same billing as the accusation, because a newsletter that prints only the half of the record it likes is doing the exact thing it's complaining about (foxbusiness.com, nbcnews.com).)

What we have on the record, then, is a warning written at the top of the State Department, read by people cleared to read it, and followed by nothing that anyone in a position to know will describe (yahoo.com, x.com, meidasnews.com, redstate.com).

My conviction, and the reason this is the Fuse rather than a gossip item, is that the real danger in this business is secrecy: what the public learns about the people steering the AI race arrives months late, if it arrives at all, and usually because someone talked to a reporter rather than because anyone with authority decided we had a right to know.

Here a Secretary of State put a warning in writing, people with high-level clearances read it before a presidential trip to China, and the rest of us, who are nominally the people those officials answer to, read about it in the paper (yahoo.com, x.com). I think the China argument is real (if we slow down alone, China doesn't, and nobody serious disputes that), which is exactly why a warning about the central figure in the AI supply chain that was, per the reporting, apparently not acted upon is, on the documented record, a pretty fucking strange way to run a China policy (meidasnews.com, redstate.com).

And before anyone writes in to say I'm picking on Nvidia, I'm not, because the condition is general: every company in this race has gathered so much power, so fast, that the people around it start treating a hard question as a kind of sabotage, and power that large, held that privately, is precisely the kind that hates being asked who read what.

Infidelity isn't espionage, the board says it has no reason to believe anything was compromised, officials initially didn't think Huang knew what the woman allegedly was, and Beijing calls the whole thing unsubstantiated (finance.yahoo.com, foxbusiness.com, nbcnews.com).

Add the fact that spy panics have a long and ugly habit of chewing up people whose only offense was knowing the wrong person, and that a company this size can't be run by headline without hurting thousands of employees and shareholders who did nothing, and you have a defense its holders would happily put their names to, and which, on the narrow question of the affair, I mostly share. It still loses, because every plank of it rests on the very secrecy that is the problem: “no reason to believe” is not “we looked and found nothing,” the officials' initial belief reaches us secondhand and unexplained, and the only people positioned to check either claim sit on the company's board or sat on the memo (finance.yahoo.com, foxbusiness.com, nbcnews.com).

Which leaves the accelerationists, whose position, as near as I can tell from how they talk about anything that slows the build, is that whoever supplies the hardware for AGI should be spared the questions we'd ask anyone else with a security badge, and that is the fastest way I know to turn a perfectly real China argument into a self-inflicted wound.

So here are the questions, in ascending order of squirm. Who in the administration read Rubio's memo, and did anyone decide anything at all? If they concluded Huang didn't know, why not say so now that the memo is in the papers, and if nobody decided anything, how many other warnings about other people at the center of this industry are sitting in the same drawer, unread, or read and shrugged at?

My prediction: the board's committee reports by the end of next March and says, at greater length and at higher hourly rates, what the board already said on day one. But the question that matters was never really for the board, which can only grade its own chief executive, and it goes to the White House, the one party that can actually answer it: who read the warning, what did they decide, and why did the public have to find out from a newspaper?

Provocation to every side

To Accelerationists: If the hardware supply for your AGI can't survive the scrutiny we'd give a contractor with a badge, the security hole is in your argument.

To the administration: Your own Secretary of State wrote the warning; tell the public who read it and what they decided.

To Nvidia's board: Publish what the committee finds, or admit that day-one absolution was a press release with outside counsel attached.

To the partisan left: No reporting says the President didn't care, so stop saying it: the documented story is bad enough without guessing at anyone's state of mind.

To China hawks: If you mean it about China, a warning apparently not acted upon should bother you a lot more than a CEO's marriage.

“I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.”

— George Orwell, You and the Atom Bomb (Tribune) (1945)

Orwell was writing about the atom bomb, and his rule was crude and mostly right: when the decisive technology is expensive and hard to make, power pools in the few hands that can make it. What he didn't foresee, and couldn't have, is that the decisive tool might be sold by a company rather than built by a state, so that one chief executive ends up the subject of a classified memo from the Secretary of State (yahoo.com, x.com).

He'd have recognized the rest instantly, the private life of one man treated as a strategic matter and the public told late, by a newspaper. Where he was naive was in assuming concentrated power would wear a uniform, when this version comes with a committee of independent directors and outside counsel, and answers to a board rather than a party (finance.yahoo.com).

Britain's councils and tribunals, which say chatbot-written grievances are drowning them, are right about the symptom and wrong about whose fault it is, and the consultants who'll inevitably be hired to fix the problem have just shown they're in no position to lecture anyone about it.

Public bodies report AI-drafted complaints swelling from about two pages to roughly ten times that length, repetitive, padded with unrelated passages and sometimes citing laws or case law that don't apply in the UK, and MPs' caseworkers say about half their cases are now partly written by AI (aiweekly.co, resultsense.com).

Deborah Evans of Lawyers in Local Government says the tools can make a complaint “sound incredibly professional, very formal,” and I'd point out, gently, that for most of the history of complaining to a government, sounding incredibly professional and very formal was precisely the privilege ordinary people didn't have, and the people who did have it tended to be the ones being complained about (aiweekly.co). (Side note: one analysis says official figures confirm some workload increases but not a nationwide AI-caused surge, and that nobody has a reliable before-and-after comparison, so keep the panic proportional until somebody actually counts (fish4news.co.uk).) Knowsley Council now warns that AI-generated text can make complaints too complicated or stuff them with irrelevant legal references, which is a fair warning, and is also the first time I can remember a council telling citizens their letters are too lawyerly (knowsley.gov.uk).

Now compare that with what happens one floor up, where the people who sell expertise to governments live. GPTZero says three Accenture-linked papers contain 31 hallucinated references among 245, and the worst of them, “Leapfrogging Development,” published with researchers from IE University in Madrid, has 15 bad ones out of 89 (resultsense.com, sg.finance.yahoo.com).

Accenture says the errors were the result of human error and that it will correct the publication, while GPTZero's co-founder says they line up with typical AI hallucination patterns, and I don't need to settle which of them is right to notice the asymmetry (gurufocus.com, tipranks.com).

A pensioner who pastes a chatbot's imaginary case law into an appeal gets a warning on the council website, while a consultancy whose entire pitch is being paid to know things gets to file a fistful of phantom citations under “human error,” which is a hell of a phrase for it, and a grace nobody extends to the pensioner. AI makes some people smarter and some people lazier, like every tool before it, and if we're going to start policing the lazy, I'd start with the ones billing governments by the hour rather than the ones who finally found a way to be heard. My prediction, in my own name: by the end of next year at least one major UK public body requires complainants to declare their AI use, no consultancy is required to do the same for the reports it sells to that body, and that gap will tell you exactly who the rules were written for.

Fifty AI firms and 10,000 compounds produced zero drugs, and the loudest skeptics are the companies already paying for the tools.

A Wall Street Journal piece opens with Anthropic's chief executive saying AI could cure most human diseases, and with Jeff Leiden, executive chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, calling such claims “complete BS” (singularityhub.com).

Leiden says Vertex hired about 50 AI outfits to mine data on 10,000 compounds and didn't get a single successful drug out of it, and an industry analysis says that as of October 2026 no drug whose target and molecule were both discovered with AI has received FDA approval (newser.com, intuitionlabs.ai, clinicaltrialvanguard.com). AstraZeneca's Pascal Soriot, meanwhile, says claiming AI will cure cancer “may be going a little too far,” even as AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly and Regeneron use it to sift patient records, pick drug targets and speed up experiments, which is to say the skeptics are also the customers (lifesciencefocus.com, newser.com).

The Heresy: The believers say the drugmakers are describing this year, not the next decade, and that companies like AstraZeneca, Bayer, Eli Lilly and Regeneron wouldn't be paying to use AI to pick targets and speed up experiments if it were useless (newser.com).

“It will start making medicine sooner or later. Maybe a slowdown and some current barriers, but it will get there. It is fully capable of it.” — r/Futurology

The Counter-heresy: The skeptics say speed was never the bottleneck: Vertex paid about 50 AI outfits to mine 10,000 compounds and got nothing out of it, and the slow, expensive part is still the bodies of actual patients, which no model can hurry (newser.com).

“I think people keep mixing up “AI is fast” with “AI is right”. Sure it can spit out a thousand candidates in a day, but someone still has to test them in humans and wait years to see what happens.” — r/Futurology

What I want to know: What result, short of an FDA approval, would make either side admit in public that it had been wrong?

Two people could watch the same broadcast and hear different words, and the list of things to fix includes “y'all.”

Microsoft's patent application US 2026/0341309 A1, titled “Near Real-Time AI Enhancement of Video or AR Presentations of Live Events,” was submitted in April 2025 and published on October 29, 2026 (techpowerup.com, propakistani.pk). It describes an AI agent that scans live audio and picks words to swap or remove based on rules and a viewer's profile, such as age, languages or location, and a generative model that replaces them in both audio and video with a delay of roughly one to ten seconds (techpowerup.com).

Its list of things to replace runs from filler words and stutters to offensive words and colloquial terms like “y'all,” and because edits are tied to each viewer's profile, two people watching the same broadcast could hear different versions of it (techpowerup.com, dexerto.com).

The Heresy: The charitable reading is that this is dubbing with good manners: a separate claim covers live translation with matching lip movements, which is the obvious and genuinely useful case, and Microsoft names lectures, award ceremonies, sporting events and live TV, which is pretty much every venue a patent lawyer could dream up, and patent lawyers are paid to dream wide (techpowerup.com, computerworld.com).

The Counter-heresy: The uncharitable reading is that a live broadcast is supposed to be a shared record of what someone actually said, and a system built to hand each viewer a personalized edit ends that record quietly, a stutter at a time, starting with “y'all” and ending wherever the rules say (techpowerup.com, dexerto.com).

What I want to know: If this ships, who decides which words get fixed, and how would the speaker, or I, ever find out what a particular viewer actually heard?

The purists say nobody can prove an LLM didn't swallow Apple's code; the forkers say look what we built. Neither has proven much.

Asahi Linux's generative AI policy says a GitHub issue drafted by an LLM may simply be closed, and that concealing extensive LLM use leads to an immediate ban (areweaifriendly.com).

Its maintainers argue developers can't assess whether an LLM has reproduced protected code or absorbed details from proprietary Apple software, and the project says all its code will be licensed under strong copyleft licenses from now on (news.lavx.hu, news.slashdot.org). Gravity Linux, a Fedora remix that forked from Asahi over the policy, has released an early alpha running on the M4 Mac mini (news.lavx.hu).

The Heresy: Asahi's maintainers have the stronger legal instinct: if nobody can tell whether a model reproduced protected code or absorbed details of Apple's proprietary software, accepting its output is a bet the whole project can't afford to lose, and going full copyleft is the same reflex, building the fence before anyone finds the hole (news.lavx.hu, news.slashdot.org).

The Counter-heresy: Gravity forked over the policy and now boots an M4 Mac mini, which in open source usually ends the argument (news.lavx.hu). Except that The Register, to its credit, calls it a demonstration of what AI-assisted reverse engineering can do, not a controlled experiment proving the policy held Asahi back (theregister.com).

What I want to know: If nobody can verify what a model absorbed, how would I, or either project, ever know its code is clean?

Copyright covers her framing, lighting and focus, not a dog in water, so the machine kept the dog and dropped the art.

The Oberlandesgericht Düsseldorf ruled on April 2, 2026, in a case brought by an unnamed animal photographer who sells underwater dog shots against a former business partner (photoworkout.com, petapixel.com). After the working relationship with a dog-training school ended, the school fed one of her photos into an AI tool and published the result (photoworkout.com). The court said copyright protected the photo's framing, perspective, lighting and shallow depth of field, but not the underlying motif, and because the AI version kept only the unprotected subject matter, it found no infringement (zetik.com, petapixel.com).

The Heresy: The pro-AI side reads this as copyright doing exactly what it always said it does: protecting the photographer's choices and not the dog in the water, which nobody owns, so a restyle that keeps only the subject is just the latest entry in a very long history of remix (zetik.com, petapixel.com).

“antis have never heard of L.H.O.O.Q. and it shows. your lack of understanding of art is staggering.” — r/aiwars

The Counter-heresy: The sharpest version of the photographer's side says she sued over the wrong thing, since the school had to feed her unaltered photo into the tool in the first place (photoworkout.com). One correction, though: the court's reasoning turned on which elements the AI version kept, not on fair use (petapixel.com).

“The artist fucked up by suing over the product which is transformative work protected in most countries under fair use laws, instead of suing over the commercial reproduction of her original work which was the fact that they had to save her actual picture unaltered to give it to the AI to mess with.” — r/aiwars

What I want to know: If a machine can keep exactly the part the law doesn't protect and throw away exactly the part it does, what is a photographer actually selling now?

No name, no date, no described offense, and a theory of AI safety that boils down to: the DOJ has it handled.

Who and what: President Donald Trump

If you want to know what AI safety looks like under this administration, it is, by the President's own telling, a phone call and a threat, and that should alarm the people who want AI regulated at least as much as the people who don't, because a rule you can't see is just a mood with a badge.

In an interview with Ross Douthat whose transcript CBS published, Trump said somebody was reported to the administration as “doing something bad with AI,” and that they called the person “very strongly” with a message that sounds like it was written for a cable drama: “Get ready to go to jail. Please give your wife a kiss good night” (cbsnews.com). Asked whether it was a major company, he answered “One of the big ones, yeah,” and asked who, he said “I can't tell you,” adding that he didn't think it was done maliciously but that it “coulda been malicious,” which is a sentence that manages to accuse and acquit in the same breath (x.com, fourweekmba.com).

His theory of the risk, from the same interview, is that it is not nearly as real as people say, that it can be managed, and that the DOJ manages it (cbsnews.com). I want rules for AI companies, with liability attached, the way we have them for drugmakers and the makers of anything else that can hurt you, and what this is instead is oversight by anecdote, with no date, no described conduct and no outcome on the record beyond one man's say-so, which is not a weaker version of a rule but the opposite of one (cellcog.ai, fourweekmba.com).

What's documented

• Trump told Ross Douthat that somebody was reported to the administration as doing something bad with AI (cbsnews.com).

• He said they called the person and told them to get ready to go to jail and to give their wife a kiss good night (cbsnews.com).

• Asked if it was a big company, he answered “One of the big ones, yeah,” in a video posted on X (x.com).

• Asked who it was, he said “I can't tell you,” and said it wasn't done maliciously but “coulda been malicious” (fourweekmba.com).

• He said AI risk is not nearly as real as claimed, can be managed, and is managed by the DOJ (cbsnews.com).

What is not proven: None of it is confirmed: the account is the President's alone and unverified, and the transcript gives no date, no description of the conduct and no outcome beyond his say-so (cellcog.ai, fourweekmba.com).

The winners still win:

• The administration, whose stated position, in the President's words, is that AI risk can be managed and that the DOJ manages it (cbsnews.com).

• The unnamed company, which stays unnamed: asked who it was, the President said “I can't tell you” (fourweekmba.com).

Questions that need to be answered:

The edge

“The current administration's stance in the US is that AI companies should self-govern themselves when it comes to risks related to AI, and I think we all know how well that's going to turn out.” — r/ChatGPT

Provocation to every side

To Trump voters: If a Democratic president bragged about threatening an unnamed CEO with jail over an undescribed offense, you'd call it a banana republic, and you'd be right.

To the AI labs: One of you got this call, if it happened the way he tells it, and your silence is a choice.

To Safety advocates: This is what oversight looks like when it comes from one man's anecdote instead of a statute, so be careful what you cheer.

To the moratorium left: A data center moratorium that hasn't advanced beyond committee won't fix this, and liability law that binds every lab on paper would (mlq.ai, datacenterdynamics.com).

Since our earlier issue covered Anthropic's claim that Claude now leads more than a quarter of its own R&D, METR has published the report from an 11-week investigation inside the company (todayforai.com). It found Anthropic's internal capability scores have grown at 1.9x the earlier rate since Oct 2025, and says it is confident that isn't simply more training compute (x.com, todayforai.com).

Ajeya Cotra, who did not work on the report, calls it the most important update on AI risk in years and says the math implies extreme superintelligence within a year if the trend continues, while calling that a naive extrapolation (ai-tldr.dev, aistop.watch, daily.dev, mtslive.substack.com). The yardstick is Anthropic's own internal measure, which is exactly why outsiders need far more than the summary before anyone treats it as settled (mtslive.substack.com).

(We just find them. We don't endorse them):

“This is why I wouldn't really be worried about whatever the US does, because quite simply, the money can flow anywhere, and the researchers can move just as well. A huge number of the key people behind recent advancements haven't been U.S. citizens in any case.” — r/accelerate

“If *progressives* are pumping the brakes on AI, it's a sign that we really do need to start being more careful.” — r/ChatGPT

“Guy who's entire job depends on gate keeping health and knowledge is asked if the health and knowledge machine is gonna be good” — r/Futurology

“My point was if you cannot copyright the material itself, then its akin to fanart at that point.” — r/aiwars

“When a company decides to remove “don’t be evil” from its mission statement, how might an AGI interpret that? Just a thought to Grok on.” — r/singularity

“The easiest way for AI to rid the world of human diseases is for AI to rid the world of humans. So we need to be very, very careful what prompts we give AI and what guardrails are in place lest we trigger unexpected consequences we cannot reverse.” — r/Futurology

The claim: Rubio warned officials about Nvidia's CEO and Trump didn't care.

What the reporting says: The reporting supports the affair, the board's investigation and Rubio's classified memo (cnbc.com, yahoo.com, x.com). No source says the President didn't care: the Times says it remains unclear whether a later decision was connected to the warning, and RedState says it's unclear why the warning was apparently not acted upon (meidasnews.com, redstate.com). That's a question worth pressing hard, not a fact about anyone's state of mind.

The claim: Democrats are pushing to pause and ban AI.

What the reporting says: The bill in question, the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, would halt new AI data center construction until safeguards are in place (axios.com, congress.gov). It has not advanced beyond committee and is described as highly unlikely to pass (mlq.ai, datacenterdynamics.com). A bill about buildings, stuck in committee, is not a party-wide ban on AI.

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Should the heads of the companies building and supplying frontier AI have to hold a security clearance to keep their jobs?

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