First, see the Jensen Huang scandal for what it is. It is potentially Teapot Dome-size, Watergate-size. Second, it is important it not be misunderstood as a merely personal story, a private matter. It isn’t a buzzy tale about a leather-jacketed titan who made a romantic misstep.
It is a story about our national security, and it carries implications in all aspects of U.S. defense and cybersecurity. It is a story about an administration’s failure to take responsibility and stop harm, for reasons that are mysterious. And of course it is about a successful top-level espionage operation carried out against America by its foremost world challenger, China.
You know the essence. The New York Times reported in October that intelligence agencies told President Trump that Jensen Huang—pioneering founder and head of Nvidia, ally, booster and donor to the president—was credibly believed to be in a romantic relationship with a woman who was a spy for China’s Ministry of State Security.
“The message” of the relationship “was delivered by Marco Rubio,” said the Times, shortly before Mr. Huang joined the president, on his personal invitation, to attend the May U.S.-China summit in Beijing. The Rubio message marked the second time in seven months that the president had been told of intelligence regarding Mr. Huang’s involvement. The Times further reported that U.S. officials had told the president last year that a Chinese spy was involved with America’s most important tech titan: “When first briefed on the issue last fall, Mr. Trump chose to take no action.”
China has denied that the woman, Alice Huang, is its spy. (She isn’t related to Mr. Huang.)
Assuming she was, in her time with Mr. Huang she would have had access to a great deal—his phone, his thoughts, his plans. She was in a position to persuade him, to plant thought-seeds, to make arguments. Presumably, as in most intimate relationships that have spanned some years, Mr. Huang would have spoken to her unguardedly—about what the American president said and wants, about what other American tech titans are doing. And she would speak to China.
That, again, means a lot, because Jensen Huang is an intimate adviser to Mr. Trump. He has meetings in the White House, public and private, in the Oval Office and the Roosevelt Room. He is at Mar-a-Lago, he is on Air Force One. At the famous White House AI summit on Sept. 29, in which dozens of America’s most powerful tech leaders were participants, Mr. Huang was seated immediately to the president’s right.
His company designs the most advanced computer chips in the world. AI systems can hardly be built without them, and China hasn’t been able to manufacture them. He is central to modern AI, a foundational figure.
The company Ms. Huang works for is widely assumed to be a Chinese cutout; there are allegations that through that company she funneled Nvidia chips to China. The Biden administration had banned the sale of those chips to China; the Trump administration tightened, refigured and then lifted those restrictions. The major loosening of controls came in December 2025. Photos of Mr. Huang and Ms. Huang first appeared in June 2024.
The president has repeatedly argued that the U.S. government must not regulate or impose controls or limits on the frontier labs of AI companies because of our competition with China. If China gets ahead of us on this technology, it will gain an unacceptable edge in military and business technology. “Whoever wins AI, wins.” Meaning owns the future.
So the reason America can’t have AI regulations or controls, in spite of its dangers—catastrophic hacks by bad actors or AI itself, the creations and spread of novel viruses, the reality that no one fully knows or understands what AI systems and programs being developed are up to—is China.
The president’s No. 1 AI adviser was arguing against regulation and pressing to lift limits on his company’s sales to China. At the same time he was intimately involved with an apparent Chinese operative. Mr. Trump was saying we have to beat China while his top AI adviser appears to have been helping China win the future.
And when reportedly told of this, the president did nothing.
If the competition with China isn’t the real reason America can’t have guardrails on or control of its AI companies, what is?
In a meeting with the press on Tuesday, Mr. Trump said that he had called Mr. Huang to buck him up and asked Mr. Huang if he knew that the woman he was involved with was a spy. According to the president, Mr. Huang said he didn’t.
It would be extremely odd and surprising if the possibility she was a Chinese agent hadn’t crossed his mind. Even accounting for human vanity and human hunger it is astonishing, because every big company in Silicon Valley has been targeted by Chinese intelligence agencies—and Silicon Valley knows it. In January 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray said the agency was opening new China-related counterintelligence investigations about twice a day, with over 2,000 such cases under way. The scale of the Chinese operations “blew me away,” he said. He was so alarmed that in October 2023 he brought the heads of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies to Palo Alto, Calif., where he said China was “engaged in wholesale intellectual-property theft” of AI and quantum computing. In January 2026, a federal jury convicted a Google engineer of AI-related espionage. There have been other such cases. In October 2025, the Times of London reported that Chinese and Russian operatives are using “sex warfare” to spy on Silicon Valley professionals. The sources were U.S. intelligence experts, one of whom had himself been targeted.
If the president knew about Mr. Huang’s situation and did nothing, that is a scandal. If U.S. intelligence figures alerted the Commerce Department there was a problem with a Chinese spy and cutout companies, and Commerce did nothing, that is a scandal. (Axios and CNN report this week that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had a heated conversation in the White House this week with Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick regarding Commerce’s apparent lack of interest or action. Mr. Lutnick is reported to have said he’ll look into it.)
It emerged this week that Mr. Huang was also personally involved with an executive in his company, which would seem to shift the story to one having merely to do with his behavior. On Thursday Mr. Huang stepped down, which encourages a sort of “nothing to see here” gloss—he paid the price, the story’s aging, our chips are still supreme.
Washington shouldn’t be diverted. Democrats newly in power will wish to exploit the weaknesses of their adversaries in the administration, but if they are wise they will also want to do something crucial and important, something that demonstrates a protectiveness toward America—that it is safe in their hands.
They have been given a gift by the scandal gods. There should be public hearings and investigations to drill down to the bottom of this story and get to the truth. Republicans should join them. They should do it together and—sorry—let the chips fall.
