Jensen Huang scandal raises even more concerns about artificial intelligence

National Post, 14 November 2026

Is the disgraced Nvidia chief the sort of character one could trust to self-police in such critical matters as AI safety?

The resignation of Nvidia’s Jensen Huang invites examination of two scandals, one particular with political consequences, and the other more general, with broader, perhaps even civilizational, consequences.

The particular scandal is that Huang may have been evading American export restrictions on Nvidia microchips going to China. The suspicion is that Huang’s mistress, an alleged Chinese spy, ran a software company in Singapore that bought Nvidia chips and may have passed those chips on to her company’s Chinese clients, along with whatever corporate secrets she obtained from her rather close proximity to Huang himself. Perhaps that included Huang relating the conversational intimacies he exchanged with President Donald Trump and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick.

Nvidia chief and tech titan Jensen Huang is in the spotlight after acknowledging an affair with a woman US officials say was working for Chinese intelligence, a claim Beijing denied. Nvidias board is now investigating the CEO and co-founder.

It’s not only a corporate espionage and national security scandal, but also a political scandal because The New York Times reported that Trump was told about the “honeytrap” more than a year ago and did nothing to clip Huang’s wings, let alone have him properly investigated. Trump, for his part, says that he asked Huang if he knew that he was carrying on an adulterous affair with a Chinese spy. He said that he didn’t know that, which seemed to satisfy the president, though not Nvidia’s board of directors, which forced Huang out. (Other affairs, including with subordinates, had come to light.)

The legal question is whether Huang committed a crime if he violated American export restrictions. The political question is whether he, or anyone in the administration, will be held to account for it.

Nvidia gave $25 million to the Trump ballroom project in October 2025; in December Trump lifted some of the Biden administration’s restrictions on sales to China, permitting Nvidia to sell chips to China, just not its best ones. And Trump insisted on the American government getting 25 per cent of sales revenue from the chip sales.

What remains to be seen is whether the $25-million ballroom donation was only for getting the permission to sell chips, or whether it would also cover a presidential pardon for Huang, should he need one.

It’s possible that there might be an extra charge for that, but it is remarkable how cheaply the Trump administration can be bought. Lutnick took the Gordie Howe bridge hostage after the Moroun family of Detroit shovelled only $1 million into the MAGA Inc. political action committee. It is likely that Huang’s mistress was not quite so cheap a date.

The broader scandal is whether Trump, Huang and other tech titans of low moral character ought to be determining — not to put too fine a point on it — the future of the global economy and perhaps humanity itself.

The stakes, such as they may be, were laid out in rather hair-raising fashion this week in Toronto, with Paul Christiano delivering the Hinton Lectures over three nights, taking up the challenged of “staying in control of self-improving AI.”

Experts like Christiano are routinely called “doomers,” as if the seismologist who tells of an imminent earthquake is a “doomer” for sounding the alarm, or the non-doomer meteorologist ought to talk up the benefits of the hurricane heading ashore.

Christiano began on Monday night by declaring that there “is a high risk of an AI takeover within the next three years … I think it’s reasonably likely many people would die during that transition.”

I am inclined to agree with Christiano that immediate and serious restrictions are needed to halt the development of AI until its dangers can be properly diagnosed and defended against. The problem is that the only people who are able to order such a halt are Trump and the tech bros of his evident admiration, who are able to throw their millions in pocket change at the same grift operation that now needs to make wise policy.

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