Artificial intelligence promises transcendence. We will ditch our tired and inefficient bodies, say farewell to tedious work and trips to the grocery store. The computer will tend to all human needs and solve all human problems.
Well, that was the idea. A.I. was supposed to achieve a new level of reality this month with the public sale of shares of Anthropic, one of the two start-ups that have created and defined this young industry. A trillion-dollar company will be born, yielding billionaires galore.
A.I. is the biggest Silicon Valley story ever. But last Sunday it was suddenly pushed aside when the chief executive of the company whose chips are literally powering this intelligence revolution confessed to cheating on his wife with a woman, Alice Huang, who U.S. officials believe was spying for China. By Thursday morning he had resigned, something few thought possible just days earlier.
The scandal that took down Nvidia chief Jensen Huang is full of implications for national security and the global A.I. boom. Mr. Huang ranked among Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk and Bill Gates as tech leaders who were considered by the world to be inseparable from the companies they built.
In Silicon Valley, people were mostly just stunned by the news. Those who have been around for a long time, and seen the stretch of territory south of San Francisco evolve from hardware manufacturing to software development to the dot-com frenzy and now the A.I. boom, said they had never seen anything like it.
Tech veterans have witnessed amazing ascensions and equally abrupt falls. They have seen abundant arrogance. Fortunes made and fortunes lost in an instant. But there’s something that stands out this time: Transcendence was never supposed to be tawdry.
“We’re told A.I. will change all of our lives in ways we can’t even understand and then suddenly here we are: the oldest story in the world,” said John Gage, a longtime Sun Microsystems executive who, like many in the valley, has been following new developments avidly. “And it’s not hard to understand at all.”
What is harder for tech people to understand is why it happened. How could someone supposedly so smart, and entrusted with so much of humankind’s future, be so casually stupid?
After all, intrigue in Silicon Valley is ubiquitous — everyone is looking for the secret sauce to help their start-up, or their country, get ahead. As a result, secrecy is an obsession. Silicon Valley did not invent the concept of nondisclosure agreements but has used them zealously. Everything and everyone is guarded.
Mr. Gage recalled working with a tech executive making his first trip to Korea decades ago.
“At two in the morning some woman sent by some technology rival taps on his hotel door,” Mr. Gage said. “That sort of thing was routine. When you’re attempting to persuade someone to buy something or sell something, you use every possible tool.”
If scheming and spying are almost inevitable in tech circles, for a long time women were not. Every woman in tech above a certain age has memories of being the only female in the room. Silicon Valley was as much a boys’ club as Wall Street or the military.
It was an engineering culture and the men who flourished had a particular aptitude. “It’s like the engineering half of their brain had taken over,” said Lynnea Johnson, who began working at Apple in the early 1980s. “The other half, the part with emotional clarity and judgment, was kind of immature.”
What struck Ms. Johnson as puzzling in Mr. Huang’s case was that he seemed not know or care that Ms. Huang was possibly in the employ of the Chinese government. He was reckless, which wasn’t his reputation.
These are dizzying days in Silicon Valley, which needs to present A.I. as unavoidable but beneficial and the executives as in control but nonthreatening. Mr. Huang was the prototype of the new transcendent man.
He did a terrific job of branding himself. He talked about his devotion to his wife Lori, who handled all the routine aspects of their lives since they met at Oregon State University. He didn’t know his address or phone number. The machines did, and that was good enough for him. Material things seemed of little interest beyond his ubiquitous leather jackets. When California debated a wealth tax, he didn’t whine it was unfair like some of his fellow billionaires. “I don’t mind paying taxes,” he proclaimed. Nvidia was his only passion. “If I’m not working, I’m thinking about working,” he said.
But it looks like he was thinking about something else, too. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Mr. Huang was having an affair with a second woman, who worked at Nvidia.
Powerful men are often drawn to risk. And their power seems to increase their sense of impunity. It’s a plotline as old as King David and Bathsheba, the wife of one of David’s top soldiers. (For those who have forgotten their Bible studies: God was really irked). A woman who has worked closely with the tech elite thinks that they are obsessed with two things they can’t control: how long they get to live on this earth, and certain primal urges.
“There’s no feeling in the world like the thrill of a new romance,” the woman said. “You can’t buy it or compel it. It’s perhaps the only emotion wealthy and powerful men can’t create at will, so naturally for them it’s irresistible. And that’s why it overrides the better judgment of the most intelligent and disciplined men on the planet.”
The woman asked to remain anonymous because she thought even talking about sex in Silicon Valley would somehow taint her. It underscores the unease that still endures between men and women in the tech world in 2026.
Others in Silicon Valley were reticent to talk, at least early in the week, because they thought Mr. Huang was likely to hang on and they feared his power. A publicist explained that her clients were not available to comment because selling their start-ups to Nvidia was their exit strategy.
Mr. Huang also had his defenders, at least until the second affair surfaced. “Just because it’s salacious does not mean it is treasonous,” said Joanna Hoffman, an early Apple executive. “It was bad judgment, but it’s as old as the human race.”
If Mr. Huang’s problems were only sex, he might still have a job. But there is also the spying angle, which China denies.
“I know of no precedent here,” said Margaret O’Mara, a Silicon Valley historian. “Corporate espionage, yes; real espionage involving anyone notable, no. Wild times.”
Espionage cases in the tech world that are discovered and prosecuted usually involve low-level employees. Their actions often play out like farces, as if it never occurred to them they could be caught.
A new employee of OpenAI, Abdulrahman Alfozan, was arrested last month and charged with wiretapping after he was allegedly discovered putting a recording device wrapped in toilet paper in a conference room. Mr. Alfozan, a Saudi national, has pleaded not guilty.
OpenAI found the device during a routine sweep. Google was not as lucky with its own employee. Linwei Ding, who started working for the company as a software engineer in 2019, uploaded confidential information about A.I. technology to his personal Google Cloud account using Apple Notes, according to court papers.
Mr. Ding simultaneously started spending a lot of time in China raising money for an A.I. start-up. To evade detection while he was 6,000 miles away from his California office, he had a colleague swipe his access badge, a process known as “ghost-badging.”
A few days before planning to flee the U.S. for good, Mr. Ding was arrested. After an 11-day trial in January, a federal jury convicted the 38-year-old engineer on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of theft. He was sentenced to nearly a year in prison.
Mr. Huang seemed to have had a similar carefree attitude toward his relationship with Ms. Huang, as if he wouldn’t be caught, and if he were, it wouldn’t matter. With his power and wealth and importance, that was probably true — until it wasn’t.
Regis McKenna is the grand old man of Silicon Valley, who came here in the early 1960s when it was still apricot orchards. The tech industry then was an arm of the defense industry, and pioneers like Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce had a Midwestern, almost military rectitude. Mr. McKenna, a marketer who worked for America Online, Apple, Genentech, Lotus, Microsoft and other companies, had dinner plans when I called. He only had time for one question.
Does too much money —
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “Does it turn their heads, does it turn their morals? Yes. Money changes people, and it started changing Silicon Valley a long time ago.”
In just a few days, if all goes as planned, will finally come the Anthropic public offering. How big a deal is it? In 1999 and 2000, the peak years of the dot-com boom, 800 companies went public. Their combined value on their first day of trading will likely be less than Anthropic, according to calculations by the finance expert Jay Ritter.
Never have so few made so much so fast. The world will be in awe. Look for some of these technologists to believe their press coverage, shrug off any natural caution and, in the great tradition of Silicon Valley, do something transcendently stupid.
John Markoff contributed reporting.
The post Silicon Valley Is Used to Scandal. This One Upped the Ante. appeared first on New York Times.
