Rubio recast CIA memo that toppled Nvidia's Jensen Huang

The classified memo whose leak triggered Jensen Huang's fall at Nvidia was assembled by Marco Rubio, who recast a CIA report in his own more assertive terms, the Washington Post reported on Friday. CIA officials are not yet convinced that the intelligence gathered on Alice Huang — including intercepted communications — shows she was knowingly passing information to Beijing, a source told CNN, and officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence called the spy label over-torqued.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said on November 12 that neither the Justice Department nor the FBI has confirmed whether Alice Huang was a spy. Representative Jim Himes, the Connecticut Democrat likely to chair the House Intelligence Committee next, said that based on briefings he is unsure whether she knowingly passed information to China. Beijing denies the allegation.

The Washington Post frames the affair as the climax of a long fight over who sets Trump's China policy. Huang had unusual access to the president and approval to sell AI chips to China; China hawks in both parties had spent years trying to break his hold. "They wanted to destroy the influence Jensen had over the president," one former official said. Rubio, who oversaw the memo as both secretary of state and national security adviser, declined to discuss his role at the G7 in Paris. Three bipartisan chip bills now sit in the Senate's defense bill, including the AI Overwatch Act from Senators Jim Banks and Elizabeth Warren, which would give Congress power over chip export licenses.

David Sacks, Trump's former AI czar, wrote on X that the spy story is already collapsing. Huang was Washington's loudest corporate defender of open-weight AI — his first-ever X post, in July, was a letter arguing open models are essential to American AI leadership — and physicist Steve Hsu wrote that he had heard on very good authority Nvidia planned to go hard at producing frontier-class open models, verticalizing its AI presence rather than depending on OpenAI or Anthropic. Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk have defended Huang; a petition to reinstate him as CEO, signed by Musk, has crossed 100,000 signatures. Five tech insiders told Politico they expect a second act, though Vrge partner Scott Gerber noted espionage allegations would make it much harder for any public company to hire him.

Meanwhile, TechCrunch asks where Nvidia's security team was. The longtime chief security officer, David Reber, stepped down in August — two and a half months before Huang's exit — citing health reasons after a Parkinson's diagnosis. His replacement, a 17-year ExxonMobil IT veteran, did not respond to questions about what the security team knew about Huang's relationships, one of them with an executive at Megaspeed, the Singapore data center company US investigators suspect of funneling Nvidia chips to China. Megaspeed denies wrongdoing.

Huang, who stepped down worth an estimated 145 billion dollars, has heard from companies eager to bring him on despite everything.