A couple of questions after reading this article. The Post is not exactly top notch journalism.
First, does her activity actually fit the definition of “espionage”?
Espionage is the act of secretly gathering confidential, classified, or proprietary information without the owner's permission
The most important question is what she actually sent and how secret it was. Most companies have levels of secrecy ranging from non public to highly sensitive. For example, schematics of their chip would be concerning.
Also, this seems pretty different from setting up a mic behind a TV.
Second, although the article tries very hard to imply there was some kind of infidelity, adding irrelevant details about Jensen’s family, I don’t know that any of that happened.
Not sure why the New York Post is being used here considering its complete lack of credibility and the fact this story appeared in the New York Times first
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is just a hit piece - IE, they were looking to paint Nvidia and Jensen in some bad light and found a vague lead. Didn't matter if the evidence isn't substantial. Just publish and smear first.
I disagree, I think this piece is the consequence of the Trump administration’s inaction. It isn’t even really a hit on Jensen:
> Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.
It’s essentially saying intelligence was gathered that a Chinese asset was close to Jensen and absolutely nothing was done about it.
He's the CEO of a company that is in it's second of 15-ish years 'selling shovel' booms. The guy who's motto has been 'We are 30 days from going out of business' for... about-ish 30 years.
Corporate espionage should have been a concern for a good part of that in his communications.
We have no clue what actually happened. For all we know it's a case of 'he was warned, his internal security groups already knew, and they were feeding useless info the whole time'.
If she is an asset and was close enough to gain physical access to his phone or main computer, that's pretty much the ballgame. CEOs often don't want their devices being on company MDMs, that's for the underlings.
I agree with everything you said, but all we know is that she had business meetings with him.
The picture in the article has a bunch of other people around them, in a bar/club. Pretty sure he wasn’t laying out the blueprints for the next chip right then and there.
Nothing has to be collected. All they need to show is that she has some link to foreign government intelligence and attempted to do anything. Good chance she was an unregistered agent which is a violation.
$1 billion for trafficking would be 100,000 trafficking victims at a rate of $10,000 per victim, which is claimed by LLMs and some Internet sites. It does not make sense and looks like another operation where ironically the trafficking was the cover.
In other words, we know nothing about the real dynamics that led to the "suicides" of Epstein and Brunel.
The linked nypost article certainly means to imply an illicit affair, both in how things are phrased and the mention of his wife and kids (the existence of which has no bearing on the story other than to remind you they exist while he is hanging out with some other female).
Ironically if the press had hounded Mitterand out of office over a sex scandal, France would likely be in far better shape today. More than anyone else he converted France from a nation of builders to a nation of takers.
It's still advisable to pretend that it might work, though. Just saying...you've got to think strategically when you work in the national security business.
Super weird that the only relationship documented in this article is two "dinners with AI executives in Asia." Does that count as a close relationship? I get invited to AI dinners in the Bay Area nonstop, and I understand they are always transactional (people wanting to sell me stuff), not actual relations with people who just happen to enjoy my presence...
Isn't Cami Clark just the classic sleep-their-way-up type? She didn't end up in the Whitehouse unlike a certain other one but her marriage at 20 was to a 64 year old...
Well, no, because she approached Jeffrey Epstein after his release from serving a prison sentence for child prostitution, and proposed (to him!) that they start up a "porn company" together. There are no "classic" explanations for that specific chapter of her biography.
I don't know what to make of this person's life story; she's certainly an extreme statistical outlier.
It has always struck me as absurd that America is so accessible to Chinese nationals. The marginal boost to economic productivity isn’t worth the threat these people pose to national security; the Chinese understand this, so why don’t Americans?
Until recently the US was on the side of international cooperation. It's not only a pity that this has changed but it's sad to see that people are completely forgetting this, as well as seemingly forgetting the incredibly bloody history that we had to endure before embracing the idea of respectful cooperation.
Now China is the grown-up in the room while the US is running around like a maniac in Venezuela, Iran, and wherever else
China who is encroaching on its neighboring countries? Attacking ships in Philippines waters. Yelling at everyone demanding respect while disrespecting everyone around them.
> It has always struck me as absurd that America is so accessible to Chinese nationals.
The US as a whole is accessible to a ton of foreign nationals because there was a push in like the 70s-early 2000s to offshore as much as possible to developing nations and exploit the arbitrage of wage labor back home. That was coupled with a foreign policy that was essentially trying to assimilate the cultures through that trade relation. Obviously China didn't reciprocate that, and many other places didn't either. But the America side of that open door policy (sentiment really) hasn't really gone away, even with the more recent immigration stuff.
I was responding to the claim that "China" or "Chinese as a whole" have higher IQs, that's not really what's happening. Which is why I brought up India, because it's a similar situation, lots and lots of people, plenty of those people are really smart. But it's a measure of a distribution, not really meaningful when talking about the people as whole themselves. Which itself is reductionist.
Would you want to spend your time in a nation looking for 2 of their smart people out of 1000 or make national ties so you can get hundreds of smart people out of their billion?
Also internal distributions will not be even, those smart people are far more likely to be clustered.
I think it's hard to get a good read on China's actual economic situation from the outside. Which, in itself, speaks to larger issues as we would understand them in the West.
There are plenty information about China on the outside, but nobody is paying anyone to push those into your feeds. It doesn't benefit any US entities to paint China in good light, and China largely doesn't market itself to the wider world (maybe to their detriment).
When is this industry going to have an open, honest discussion about how not getting enough trim in your younger years makes you especially vulnerable to these schemes once you acquire power and wealth?
I've seen 80 variations of this same story over the years.
Gates and Bezos slept around with younger women and lost more in divorces than 99.9999% of men could ever dream of making.
Elon has recreated the backstabbing and infighting of imperial harem politics with a bunch of women he didn't even physically sleep with.
Despite his other failings you have to give Zuck credit for genuinely being a wholesome wifeguy by all appearances.
It’s a generational thing. Zuck is about the age when being nerdy became a perfectly normal thing in mainstream culture. When Gates and co were growing up their personality was the butt of jokes, and they’d be laughed at for trying to approach the “popular” kids.
That seems like either the behavior of an extremely devoted husband or the behavior of a husband who cheats shamelessly and then gives her showy gifts to "make up for it"
With the blowups of 2 prominent "wifeguys" in recent years and Zuck's attempt at being more "masculine", as he called it, I'm suspecting it's the latter.
iirc, it originally was gonna be of himself but he changed it because that looked a bit too…on the nose.
I think the wife hates it.
Many of those with options see it as a badge of pride to stay loyal. One of those, ya I could if I wanted to but hey look I have self control…most of the time.
Bezos i dont think is in the same bucket as gates. If you read about it, he was blackmailed for cheating and said f it and that is how his wife found out. Even then, he seems to be into…older women if his new wife is anything to go by.
Both of Bezos' wives are 6 years younger than him (he's 62 and both MacKenzie Scott and Lauren Sánchez are 56). Their ages are only noteworthy for being so completely not noteworthy for a rich guy. It seems like he has age-appropriate taste in women.
I think that is a rather simplistic view of what motivates people.
I would at least like to see some statistics on how much early adulthood behaviour predicts particular later life behaviours before making any conclusions.
Rather than characterising things as 'getting enough trim' perhaps a broader education in dealing with the emotions of life might be more productive.
I don't really understand the common wisdom that if you get enough when you're young, you won't want it later. It wasn't espionage, but Shannon Sharpe just lost a $100M ESPN media deal last year for chasing young tail, and he has been fit, wealthy, and famously a playboy surrounded by women since his early 20s if not earlier.
From what I have seen the truth is closer to the opposite; that you don't get it out of your system. You get it into your system. I'm afraid that if one truly wants to avoid these scandals you're better off following the Mike Pence playbook, not the Tony Stark one.
In a society as transactional as ours (contemporary US culture) one must ask themselves "cui bono?" a hundred times a day. I'd imagine that if the answer is "me" enough times the one develops blind spots such as this one.
On the flip side novels have been written about the lies people tell themselves when they get romantically entangled with obvious troublemakers. Those plots didn't come from nowhere...
It's not an unreasonable point, but let's not pretend these are naive chumps who crumble at the sight of a woman. In this case, Jensen could have been coordinating with intel agencies to feed disinformation or a honeypot honeypot. Obvious speculation, but clearly he understands the game on the table better than us. Still, it is a tactic as old as time, so I am sure plenty fall victim to some degree
in addition to corporate aircraft, drivers, physicians, security, etc... it's high time boardrooms start provisioning high-performing CEOs with concubines.
For each of your 80 stories there are probably a dozen stories of former frat boys and Trump/Epstein types also being in compromising relationships.
I think it has much less to do with any individual's sexual history and much more to do with the rapacious/hypersexual elite culture in USA and elsewhere.
Mostly monogamous marriage is almost certainly a stable equilibrium given that you see it in societies all over the world that had no contact with each other and little in common otherwise. You see monogamous marriage in neolithic europe as well as among native americans.
What exactly does "better" mean? Both are tools for manipulating public opinion. The NYT is better at inflating it's own reputation.
If NYT was honest, at some point in the past decade it would have acknowledged that one of the primary reporters on its Donald Trump beat was the daughter of an executive VP at the long-time PR firm of Fred and Donald Trump.
There's a man that fell off the subway platform, about to get killed by the subway train, and the New York post photographer saw a great opportunity for a photo op for his employer instead of, y'know helping the guy out. Sure, the NYT has had its fair share of scandals but the NY Post isn't well respected for a whole other level of malfeasance.
This article has the flavor of a strategic political leak by the Trump administration, likely a prelude to blackmail to get NVidia to do something friendly to the administration. You don't have multiple "people briefed on the surveillance, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the findings are drawn from classified intelligence" unless someone high-up in the CIA is greenlighting the leak; that's a crime punishable by decades in prison. And then the whole article has the flavor of "We appreciate your continued support, Jensen, we know you have been a strong ally in public, but if you think of defying us we will hit you with espionage charges and throw you in jail. Look, the groundwork is already in the NYTimes."
Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something.
> "Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something."
Chinese models disappearing from HuggingFace (recently acquired by Nvidia).
GLM-flash and Qwen-next disappeared from ArtificialAnalysis (the top benchmark site) a few days ago; I was wondering if that was a prelude to something greater. Testing the waters.
"These days" are ending. Nothing about the current geopolitical climate, global supply chain, energy price, or socioeconomic reality of inter-generational quality of life chasm is stable. Taking a trillion dollar bite out of a bubble beneficiary is a clear opening move for a novel government with restored oversight and an eye on the books.
So they leaked a story about Nvidia violating export restrictions in order to “blackmail” Nvidia into… obeying export restrictions? Wow, that’s some good old fashioned Trumpian 44D chess right there.
It's implicitly "President Trump was briefed and took no action yet."
You don't write about it in the NYTimes unless there's a purpose. That purpose is leverage. If you're negotiating, you don't blow all your leverage upfront; you subtly let the other party know you have it, and then wait to see if they play ball. If they don't, that's when you apply pressure.
Another interpretation is that someone in the intelligence community felt that since Trump was ignoring what they perceived to be a serious threat to security, their best recourse was to use the media to raise an alarm.
Hmm, that's a possible read on it. I'd initially assumed an administration leak because the article seems more pro-Trump than the facts warrant (eg. "Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the A.I. revolution as well as an influential ally of President Trump’s" => Jensen Huang seems neutral/Democratic to me, though primarily concerned with the survival of his business, the picture of the White House luncheon with tech leaders => look at how he's projecting power and the support of the tech community, "People who have watched the two men interact say Mr. Trump has been won over by the lavish praise Mr. Huang has given the president in public" => look at how much lavish praise Mr. Trump gets!). But on a second read, all of those could be interpreted as the CIA complaining about how the close relationship between Trump & Huang is jeopardizing national security, and a few other comments in the article (eg. the sentences about how the Biden administration moved to clamp down on AI exports to China before Trump took over, and how this investigation started under the Biden administration) would support that read.
Jared Kushner’s direct access to the Russian oligarch is more damning than any Chinese industrial espionage campaign, which happens every day around the world. Yesterday, Russia was a hostile energy supplier; today, it is an energy-trading partner. Good or bad depends on who is in power.
Given that China is releasing open weight, self-hostable models I'd far rather NVIDIA work with them than with the US and the closed source model providers. I'd rather have a Chinese model running on my own machine with NVIDIA hardware than an Anthropic/OpenAI/X model running in a data center somewhere, for multiple reasons.
to be fair Jensen seems to be rubbing butts with pretty much anyone the past year. Every day I see a new video with him and some billionaire / podcaster / influencer et cetera.
The technology is honey for the flies of geopolitics.
This is an apparent nothingburger with zero hint of anything outside plain old business schmoozing on Jensen's part. 'Close relationship' is a really good weasel word (weasel phrase?).
> US authorities have been investigating Megaspeed over suspicions that it helped Chinese firms circumvent US export restrictions and smuggle advanced Nvidia chips into China, the Times reported.
> Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. Mr. Trump has been wary of disrupting Nvidia’s chip sales, which are helping to drive the economy and the stock market, and of further complicating the trading relationship with China.
"The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen who has served as a top executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer and cloud partner that provides AI computing power to Chinese companies including Alibaba, the New York Times reported Thursday."
Do you think that when Jensen talks to Sam Altman or Amodei they don't chat on the phone with Donald Trump?? This is just a smear.
No idea why you're getting down voted here. People are obviously willfully ignorant that a business would not be interested in doing business and making money, they really don't care who the customer is or why they're spending.
Has Jensen ever expressed an interest or personality?
To me, he seems the platonic ideal of the immigrant Bay Area tech worker. There's absolutely nothing inside besides the will and drive to succeed at work.
Here on HN, the submitter submitted a link to the NYPost article, but in the description they put a link to the NYTimes version and an archive.is capture of the NYTimes.
If she is a spy I doubt china gave her much choice. I wonder if they paid her or just threatened her loved ones. Either way, she had to hang out with Jensen Huang, poor woman.
A spy?! Almost half the people working in usa big tech are asian. If it tips over 50% you could call the white people the spies in asian companies located in usa
First, does her activity actually fit the definition of “espionage”?
Espionage is the act of secretly gathering confidential, classified, or proprietary information without the owner's permission
The most important question is what she actually sent and how secret it was. Most companies have levels of secrecy ranging from non public to highly sensitive. For example, schematics of their chip would be concerning.
Also, this seems pretty different from setting up a mic behind a TV.
Second, although the article tries very hard to imply there was some kind of infidelity, adding irrelevant details about Jensen’s family, I don’t know that any of that happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/politics/nvidia-china-...
https://archive.ph/K7bih
> Mr. Huang has not received a defensive briefing, warnings sometimes given to Americans who are being targeted by foreign intelligence services, people briefed on the surveillance said.
It’s essentially saying intelligence was gathered that a Chinese asset was close to Jensen and absolutely nothing was done about it.
And by that, I mean...
He's the CEO of a company that is in it's second of 15-ish years 'selling shovel' booms. The guy who's motto has been 'We are 30 days from going out of business' for... about-ish 30 years.
Corporate espionage should have been a concern for a good part of that in his communications.
We have no clue what actually happened. For all we know it's a case of 'he was warned, his internal security groups already knew, and they were feeding useless info the whole time'.
We have on the record sources saying that he was not warned by the government. Hence me saying this is a story about government failure.
The picture in the article has a bunch of other people around them, in a bar/club. Pretty sure he wasn’t laying out the blueprints for the next chip right then and there.
On that note, they never worked on french spies as infidelity and sex stuff hold seemingly zero leverage over french men.
Tell that to Jean-Luc Brunel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Luc_Brunel
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/oct/31/jp-morgan-j...
$1 billion for trafficking would be 100,000 trafficking victims at a rate of $10,000 per victim, which is claimed by LLMs and some Internet sites. It does not make sense and looks like another operation where ironically the trafficking was the cover.
In other words, we know nothing about the real dynamics that led to the "suicides" of Epstein and Brunel.
This may be entirely unfair framing of course.
(According to the Wall Street Journal)
I don't know what to make of this person's life story; she's certainly an extreme statistical outlier.
Now China is the grown-up in the room while the US is running around like a maniac in Venezuela, Iran, and wherever else
No, China is no more a grownup than the US.
This is what I was responding to. I'm trying to figure out how it is nonsense because India has a large population.
India already makes up like 70% of H1Bs.
The US as a whole is accessible to a ton of foreign nationals because there was a push in like the 70s-early 2000s to offshore as much as possible to developing nations and exploit the arbitrage of wage labor back home. That was coupled with a foreign policy that was essentially trying to assimilate the cultures through that trade relation. Obviously China didn't reciprocate that, and many other places didn't either. But the America side of that open door policy (sentiment really) hasn't really gone away, even with the more recent immigration stuff.
I was responding to the claim that "China" or "Chinese as a whole" have higher IQs, that's not really what's happening. Which is why I brought up India, because it's a similar situation, lots and lots of people, plenty of those people are really smart. But it's a measure of a distribution, not really meaningful when talking about the people as whole themselves. Which itself is reductionist.
Would you want to spend your time in a nation looking for 2 of their smart people out of 1000 or make national ties so you can get hundreds of smart people out of their billion?
Also internal distributions will not be even, those smart people are far more likely to be clustered.
I've seen 80 variations of this same story over the years.
Despite his other failings you have to give Zuck credit for genuinely being a wholesome wifeguy by all appearances.
That seems like either the behavior of an extremely devoted husband or the behavior of a husband who cheats shamelessly and then gives her showy gifts to "make up for it"
I think the wife hates it.
Many of those with options see it as a badge of pride to stay loyal. One of those, ya I could if I wanted to but hey look I have self control…most of the time.
I would at least like to see some statistics on how much early adulthood behaviour predicts particular later life behaviours before making any conclusions.
Rather than characterising things as 'getting enough trim' perhaps a broader education in dealing with the emotions of life might be more productive.
From what I have seen the truth is closer to the opposite; that you don't get it out of your system. You get it into your system. I'm afraid that if one truly wants to avoid these scandals you're better off following the Mike Pence playbook, not the Tony Stark one.
Once you open pandoras box, you dont put it back in. It doesnt matter what age.
The whole, they didnt get enough when younger, sounds like a very strange weird explanation that falls flat when you think for more than 5s about it.
On the flip side novels have been written about the lies people tell themselves when they get romantically entangled with obvious troublemakers. Those plots didn't come from nowhere...
Huh?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trim (second noun sense, def #8)
I think it has much less to do with any individual's sexual history and much more to do with the rapacious/hypersexual elite culture in USA and elsewhere.
Also, New York Post? Let's do better.
If NYT was honest, at some point in the past decade it would have acknowledged that one of the primary reporters on its Donald Trump beat was the daughter of an executive VP at the long-time PR firm of Fred and Donald Trump.
https://archive.is/dOHL1
https://nypost.com/2012/12/05/a-picture-of-controversy/
There's a man that fell off the subway platform, about to get killed by the subway train, and the New York post photographer saw a great opportunity for a photo op for his employer instead of, y'know helping the guy out. Sure, the NYT has had its fair share of scandals but the NY Post isn't well respected for a whole other level of malfeasance.
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...
The issues you allude to don’t create an equivalence, except in the minds of people with no capacity for discernment whatsoever.
Makes me wonder what the next headline is going to be, probably some deal between NVidia and the federal government over export restrictions or something.
Chinese models disappearing from HuggingFace (recently acquired by Nvidia).
GLM-flash and Qwen-next disappeared from ArtificialAnalysis (the top benchmark site) a few days ago; I was wondering if that was a prelude to something greater. Testing the waters.
For one, the US doesn't do anti-trust these days, just pay off uncle-trump to get your way.
Two, there are tons of model providers.
Their benchmarks have been replaced with "N/A" for several days now,
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/qwen3-8-flash-next
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/glm-5-3-flash/
That is really weird given how widely used they are.
You don't write about it in the NYTimes unless there's a purpose. That purpose is leverage. If you're negotiating, you don't blow all your leverage upfront; you subtly let the other party know you have it, and then wait to see if they play ball. If they don't, that's when you apply pressure.
Swalwell was targeted by Fang Fang in 2012 when he was on Dublin, California's city council and running for his first term in the House of Reps.
When he was by the FBI to Fang Fang's ties, he immediately cooperated with the FBI's investigation and did exactly what they requested.
Thinking Swalwell made any mistake whatsoever is a great shibboleth for a Twitterbrained midwit.
The technology is honey for the flies of geopolitics.
What did Jensen know and when did he know it?
He should be forced to testify in front of congress.
Lmao
Do you think that when Jensen talks to Sam Altman or Amodei they don't chat on the phone with Donald Trump?? This is just a smear.
To me, he seems the platonic ideal of the immigrant Bay Area tech worker. There's absolutely nothing inside besides the will and drive to succeed at work.
The headline is from the Post article, not the NYT version is much better.
EDIT: Looks like link now points to NYT