The successful targeting of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang by a Chinese intelligence service is a big deal. But foremost among U.S. concerns is how this incident underlines China’s unparalleled threat. It is thus absurd that Democrats want to eliminate the House Select Committee on China.
Alice Huang was, at least nominally, an executive at Megaspeed, a cloud computing company based in Singapore. But that was just Huang’s cover. In reality, she was either an officer or an agent for China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS) intelligence service. The MSS is the Chinese Communist Party’s primary spy service, known for its vast scale and ruthless action.
Megaspeed was a good cover. Seducing an evidently ego-blinded Jensen Huang, Alice secured Megaspeed’s purchase of approximately $7.5 billion of Nvidia’s high-end semiconductor chips. Nvidia was restricted from selling these chips to China due to U.S. fears that they would be used for military or other hostile purposes. Beijing, however, had a solution. As soon as Megaspeed bought the chips, it transferred them to China. In essence, Alice’s seduction enabled America’s preeminent adversary to completely bypass U.S. export bans. This episode is what spies would call the art of a honeypot-cutout deal.
U.S. intelligence officials are now worrying about what else Alice learned from her pillow talk, and what it means for the future of artificial intelligence.
During the affair, Jensen was supervising the development of Nvidia’s future products and associated research. No small consideration is that Nvidia is the world’s biggest company and the most influential in human development. How much of Nvidia’s secret know-how got back to Chinese developers? Will this information allow China to close the AI gap with the U.S.?
Another problem?
It’s public knowledge that, as he slept with Alice, Jensen was aggressively lobbying President Donald Trump to reduce export restrictions on his company. And considering that he was in active contact with Trump, Jensen presumably had keen insight into U.S. government deliberations — and specific security concerns — related to China. This information would have been prized in Beijing more than a wiretap of Trump and Jensen’s phone conversations. After all, unlike a wiretap, Alice could provide both the substance and the background characterization of what Jensen had told her. This would have informed both Beijing’s negotiating strategy and its own AI-related research.
It is mind-boggling, then, that many in the incoming Democratic Congress want to get rid of the House’s China Committee.
The Committee has done excellent bipartisan work in scrutinizing the threat posed by China to U.S. interests over the past few years. But whether for reasons of wokeness or, as the language in a left-wing advocacy letter implies, Chinese influence, Democrats now say that the Committee’s work can be enveloped under the House Foreign Affairs Committee. This would be very foolish. Because of its global economic influence and AI research, China poses an even greater long-term threat to the U.S. than did the Soviet Union at its peak. Congress needs a focal point in addressing this systemic challenge.
Beijing says otherwise, of course. As it always does when confronted with evidence of its espionage, China is screeching that it is the victim here. The story is all “smears” and “pure fabrication out of thin air,” its officials say. They insist that “The U.S. should stop fabricating the ‘Chinese spy’ narratives as a pretext for imposing technology restrictions.”
It’s laughable rhetoric. Ultimately, however, none of this is terribly complicated.
THE VOTERS HAVE SPOKEN. BUT WHAT DID THEY SAY?
As the Washington Examiner noted before news of the affair broke, “The Chinese intelligence services have redirected their vast spying apparatus to steal as much AI-related information as quickly as they can… That is to say nothing of the autonomous cyber, drone, missile, and other military forces that AI will enable.” Following the discovery of a Saudi spy at OpenAI, we similarly editorialized on the need for the Trump administration to reverse cuts to the FBI’s spy-hunting division.
Our political and business leaders need to get a grip. If nothing else, this sorry saga shows that China is no longer at the gates; it’s not-so-secretly sitting at the table.