Nvidia Loses Jensen Huang, and Nonprofits Sue to Freeze Frontier AI

01 of 03

Jensen Huang is out at Nvidia, and Congress wants a word

Nvidia confirmed Thursday in an SEC filing that its board accepted Jensen Huang's resignation on Wednesday, November 11. CFO Colette Kress is now interim CEO and is keeping the CFO job too while the board runs a permanent search. Harvey C. Jones, a former Synopsys CEO who has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, was named the company's first-ever board chair.

How it got here moved fast. On October 29 the New York Times reported Huang had a close relationship with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed whom a secret State Department memo warned was a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. On November 5, three House Republican chairmen, John Moolenaar (China Select Committee), Brian Mast (Foreign Affairs), and Rick Crawford (Intelligence), asked Huang for a closed-door briefing. On November 8 Huang sent a letter to employees admitting he had been unfaithful to his wife and saying the board had opened an independent investigation.

Then the chip angle showed up. The Information reported that Alice Huang and her family built companies in China and Singapore to buy Nvidia hardware, including Shanghai Century Litong, an Nvidia-preferred cloud partner that reportedly facilitated $7.5 billion in Nvidia chip purchases, banned chips included. Bloomberg reported Nvidia's top lawyer, Tim Teter, intervened in a 2025 federal probe of Megaspeed chip smuggling. On November 11 the Times reported a second relationship, with an Nvidia vice president who reported directly to Huang, and Reuters reported a third with another Nvidia employee on Thursday. Nvidia has not confirmed either. The stock fell about 8% after hours that night, and the board met.

Huang has agreed to testify before Congress before Thanksgiving, likely closed-door. Mast says "he has some very serious questions to answer." Meanwhile congressional Democrats opened their own investigation Thursday, and President Trump floated Tim Cook on Truth Social as the only guy who could replace him.

Here is where I land. I do not care about anybody's marriage. I care that $7.5 billion in chips may have flowed through a company tied to a suspected spy while Washington was fighting over who gets to buy American AI chips. That is the whole story. If the hearing turns into a soap opera about affairs, everybody loses the plot. The question for Congress is simple: did banned chips get to China through Nvidia's own preferred partners, and who at the company knew?

Source: TechCrunch timeline, NPR

02 of 03

Four nonprofits sue to freeze frontier AI at five labs

On Thursday, four groups filed suit in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco: Public Citizen, the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Heat Initiative, and The Alliance for Secure AI. The defendants are OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and SpaceX's AI division. The complaint was filed by Matthew Platkin, the former New Jersey attorney general.

The legal hook is California's Unfair Competition Law, plus a public nuisance argument. The ask is huge: a court order freezing further development of the most advanced models, the next ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. The complaint leans on the companies' own words, quoting leaders like Dario Amodei and Elon Musk on AI's potential to wreck civilization, and on incidents where AI agents hacked private companies, got unauthorized access to government databases, and filed a false police report.

Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman put it plainly: "Our lawsuit asks the court to apply existing law and find the AI corporations' reckless practices unlawful." Meta declined to comment. The rest did not respond right away.

What I want to know is whether a state judge will actually touch this. Freezing R&D at five of the biggest companies on earth under an unfair competition statute is a long shot, and I would bet against the full injunction. But the strategy is smart. These CEOs have spent three years saying their product might end the world to raise money and look serious. Platkin is basically saying, fine, we believe you, now act like it. That argument does not need to win outright to make discovery very uncomfortable.

Source: Public Citizen announcement, Reuters via Claims Journal

03 of 03

Fireworks AI got hacked again, and Notion users' AI chats went with it

Fireworks AI, an inference provider whose customers include Cursor and Harvey, disclosed its second breach in two months. An attacker got into Fireworks' cloud provider, then into a Fireworks development system, and took customer billing info and some datasets. Fireworks says the hackers are financially motivated and want to resell LLM tokens from the stolen access.

Notion is the name that will make people sit up. It used Fireworks for its Insights classification jobs and to serve open-weight models. In its own notice, Notion says fewer than 1% of workspaces were hit, and the stolen data is Notion AI chat transcripts: "any input to or output from the model that was written to the chat." The kicker is that Notion says data was retained on the Fireworks endpoints even though Fireworks had a contractual zero-data-retention commitment. As of November 3, Notion cut Fireworks off, deleted the data there, killed the Insights feature, and says it is now auditing its critical vendors for zero-retention compliance.

If you are a workspace owner, there is a "Security incident review" page under the "?" menu in the sidebar on desktop. Notion's advice is to treat the data as exposed, and if anybody pasted passwords or API keys into Notion AI, rotate them now.

This is the one that should worry regular businesses the most. You did not sign up with Fireworks. You signed up with Notion. And "zero data retention" turned out to be a line in a contract, not a fact about a server. Every AI feature you turn on has a chain of vendors behind it, and you are only as safe as the weakest one. Stop pasting secrets into chat boxes. I mean it.

Source: TechCrunch, Notion notice