The Jensen Huang controversy is a reminder that even as artificial intelligence grows more sophisticated, human vulnerability remains one of the simplest weaknesses to exploit.
The former Nvidia chief has acknowledged an affair with Alice Huang, who has been alleged to have links to Chinese intelligence. He has also faced accusations involving relationships with two employees. Yet Huang once identified cybersecurity as one of AI’s most promising future markets.
But sophisticated hackers may not always be necessary when the head of one of the world’s most advanced technology companies can apparently be exposed by one of espionage’s oldest methods: the tactic Chairman Mao called the ‘beautiful woman stratagem’, or meiren ji in Mandarin.
This is neither the first case nor likely to be the last in which a powerful man, buoyed by influence and a formidable ego, appears to have stumbled into a honeytrap. Chinese intelligence agencies have long used such operations for espionage and coercion, both within China and overseas.
As the technological rivalry between China and the United States intensifies, Silicon Valley and its often socially awkward technology specialists have become increasingly attractive targets.
Chen Yixin, China’s spy chief, recently called AI ‘the main battleground in global technological competition’. Technology companies appear conscious of the danger, although their efforts often involve awkward training exercises designed to teach employees how to recognise suspicious approaches.
Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s former chief, acknowledged an affair with Alice Huang, who has been alleged to be a Chinese spy. The pair are pictured together, while Huang has also faced accusations involving two employees.
Shirly Shen, of Hong Kong-based Internship Union, was named by MI5 in a warning about alleged Chinese spies posing as ‘headhunters’ for the country’s principal intelligence agency.
OpenAI, whose models rank among the most advanced in the world, reportedly puts its predominantly male technical staff through a series of simulated situations, including a late-night knock at a hotel-room door.
In one scenario, a blonde woman arrives with champagne. If that fails, a redhead is sent in, followed by a young man. According to reports, only employees who resist each approach are deemed to have passed.
But if Huang, one of the most influential figures in technology, was indeed caught in a honeytrap, the episode suggests that corporate training has a considerable distance to travel.
In Britain, MI5 has warned that Chinese intelligence services seek to develop ‘long-term relationships’ and may exploit vulnerabilities, including sexual relationships, to pressure people into co-operating.
In evidence submitted to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, MI6 referred to the range of techniques used by China, including ‘blackmail’ and ‘honeytrapping’.
The technology industry inevitably brings to mind Roddy Ho, the hapless computer expert from Apple TV’s Slow Horses.
Suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang cultivated relationships with numerous Democratic politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere before returning to China in 2015.
Rupert Murdoch met his third wife, Wendi Deng, in Hong Kong while she was an intern at Star TV. Rumours have alleged that Deng was connected to Chinese intelligence.
Played by Christopher Chung, Ho is an arrogant and socially inept computer expert who finds it difficult to communicate without a screen. That makes him vulnerable to ‘Tara’, the supposed girlfriend who is ultimately revealed to be a terrorist planning a cyberattack.
For the real-world equivalents of Roddy Ho, seduction is more likely to begin online. British and American intelligence agencies have warned about fake LinkedIn profiles, often using photographs of attractive Asian women—whether real or AI-generated—to establish relationships with potential targets.
The objective may be to extract sensitive information or lure the target to questionable overseas ‘conferences’, where a direct approach can be made or compromising sexual material obtained.
Last month, Changli ‘Sophia’ Luo, a glamorous entrepreneur born in China, pleaded guilty in Manhattan to wire fraud after allegedly attempting to extort more than $1 billion (£753 million) from financier Wesley Edens, co-owner of Aston Villa.
The pair had met on LinkedIn. Luo threatened to publish a secret recording of their sexual encounter unless Edens paid her. The court heard no evidence linking her to a hostile intelligence service, although Chinese law requires citizens to assist the country’s intelligence agencies when called upon.
MI5 recently warned that Chinese intelligence officers may pose as ‘headhunters’. Its alert named Amanda Qiu, chief executive of Beijing-based BP-YR Executive Search, and Shirly Shen of Hong Kong’s Internship Union as alleged fronts for the Ministry of State Security, China’s principal intelligence agency.
The profiles were allegedly used to identify people with valuable expertise or access. ‘The headhunters are typically China-based individuals who make initial contact with a target before referring them to an officer,’ the MI5 warning stated.
‘It is a phenomenon. And I will tell you, it is weird,’ said James Mulvenon, chief intelligence officer at Pamir Consulting, which assesses risks for businesses investing in China.
Mulvenon told The Times that he had received a striking number of highly polished LinkedIn approaches from apparently attractive young Chinese women.
He said two such women later appeared at an investment-risk conference he was hosting in Virginia, seeking admission. ‘We didn’t let them in, but they had all the information [about the event] and everything else,’ he said.
Recently declassified documents detail how suspected spy Christine Fang cultivated contacts among Democratic politicians across the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond before fleeing to China in 2015.
Among those connected to her was former congressman Eric Swalwell, who served on an influential intelligence committee. Reports have also claimed that sex workers in affluent parts of the Bay Area, including Menlo Park—the home of Facebook, now Meta—were paid by foreign spies for information about their clients.
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Another case involved Katrina Leung, a Los Angeles consultant and Republican fundraiser suspected of spying for China. She had affairs with two FBI agents involved in handling her case.
Leung persuaded the agents that she was also working for the Bureau, while allegedly continuing to pass confidential information to Beijing. She was arrested in 2003.
Although technology is a major focus of Chinese espionage, the ‘beautiful woman stratagem’, or meiren ji, extends well beyond the technology sector. ‘We are constantly having to remove people from our embassies and consulates in China because they get into these honeytraps,’ Dennis Wilder, a former CIA China analyst and now a senior fellow at Georgetown University, told The Washington Post.
In 2013, during a corruption investigation involving British pharmaceutical giant GSK in China, a secretly recorded video showed the company’s China chief, Mark Reilly, having sex with his Chinese girlfriend in his Shanghai apartment. The footage was emailed to GSK’s chief executive and other board members.
The apparent purpose of the operation was to place pressure on GSK during the investigation. Entering the apartment and installing the recording device would have required considerable access, leading to speculation that professional intelligence operatives were involved.
Chinese security services have also been accused of using compromising footage in several other politically useful corruption cases.
Around the time of the Reilly affair, 15 officials in Chongqing were punished after appearing in secretly recorded sexual videos.
The most prominent was Lei Zhengfu, a powerful local Communist Party secretary who was sentenced to 13 years in prison. The case was officially described as ‘criminal extortion’ by a ‘local businessman’. At the time, however, Xi Jinping—then newly established as China’s paramount leader—was engaged in a bitter power struggle with Bo Xilai, a local party leader and Lei’s ally.
When I was a correspondent in Beijing, a notorious bar in the diplomatic district called Maggies was known as ‘honey-pot central’. It was reportedly packed with sex workers, owned by former security officials and widely believed to be under the influence of the Public Security Bureau.
The venue remained popular with the less cautious expatriate community in Beijing. I still wonder how many murky and potentially damaging recordings might have been stored away for future use.
Shenzhen, in southern China just across the border from Hong Kong, is now the country’s technology hub. For many years, however, it was also known as ‘mistress village’. Businessmen based in the former British colony kept their ‘minor wives’ there, visiting them while ostensibly travelling to inspect factories. Such arrangements also left them vulnerable to extortion and coercion.
Hong Kong was also where Rupert Murdoch met his third wife, Wendi Deng, who was then an intern at Star TV, owned by Murdoch’s News Corp.
Widely reported accounts say Deng obtained the internship after buying a first-class ticket from New York to Hong Kong and, by coincidence, sitting beside Bruce Churchill, then Star TV’s chief operating officer. Churchill subsequently helped her secure a position.
Persistent rumours have alleged that Deng—who has also been reported to have had romantic links to Tony Blair and Eric Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive—was connected to Chinese intelligence.
In his biography of Murdoch, Michael Wolff wrote that, after divorcing Deng, the media proprietor repeatedly claimed she had been a Chinese spy during their marriage. In 2017, reports said US counterintelligence officials had warned Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s billionaire son-in-law, that Deng might use her friendship with Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, to advance Chinese government interests.
China, however, is where the honeytrap has perhaps developed its most extensive history, occasionally with extraordinary twists.
In May 1986, French diplomat Bernard Boursicot went on trial in Paris for spying for Beijing after being recruited by his Chinese lover, Shi Peipu, a singer with the Beijing Opera. The extraordinary revelation was that Shi was a man. Boursicot claimed he had not realised this during their 18-year relationship, attributing the misunderstanding to Shi’s ability to retract his testicles.
China is not the only country to have used sexual entrapment. In 1986, Israel abducted Mordechai Vanunu, who had exposed the existence of the country’s nuclear programme, after luring him from London to Rome with Cheryl Bentov, a Mossad agent using the codename ‘Cindy’. She had established a romantic relationship with the engineer.
During the Cold War, East Germany’s Stasi turned the traditional honeytrap on its head by creating a special unit of ‘Romeo spies’. These agents were sent into West Germany to target influential women, begin romantic relationships and obtain access to secrets.
The collection of kompromat, or compromising material, was also a standard tactic of the Soviet KGB and remains associated with Russian intelligence. Rumours intensified after the Steele dossier emerged in 2017—a 35-page collection of intelligence memos compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele. It alleged, without proof, that Russia possessed compromising material about Donald Trump involving disputed and unprintable claims about sex workers during visits to Moscow before he became president.
In China, however, the use of honeytraps arose from institutional necessity as well as deliberate strategy. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s devastated the country’s intelligence services through a decade of political chaos, purges and ideological fanaticism. The CIA estimated that as many as half the staff in Chinese embassies were recalled, while human-intelligence networks collapsed.
When Deng Xiaoping emerged as China’s leader in 1978, two years after Mao’s death, he faced the task of rebuilding the intelligence apparatus. In 1983, he established the Ministry of State Security, which combined cyber operations with informal techniques such as meiren ji.
This ‘all of society’ model treats almost anyone as a potential intelligence asset. Chinese law also requires citizens to co-operate with state intelligence agencies. As Deng opened China to the West during the 1980s, the opportunities for entrapment expanded, with diplomats, politicians, businesspeople and academics seeking access to the country’s celebrated ‘economic miracle’.
Money, flattery and commercial or academic opportunities could be offered first, followed by the use of meiren ji. The method appears to exploit a long-standing Western male fantasy about the ‘exotic’ Asian woman.
The MSS is reported to recruit women from outside the formal organisation, with intelligence officers becoming involved after a relationship has been established. That pattern has been suggested in the case of Jensen Huang, where the relationship with Alice Huang, described as a determined businesswoman, allegedly preceded any recruitment.
The Nvidia controversy is particularly ironic because Huang appeared willing to put commercial priorities ahead of broader national-security concerns, lobbying Donald Trump to permit the sale of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips to China despite objections in Washington. The episode is likely to fuel calls in Congress for tighter chip controls and for authorities to dismantle networks of questionable buyers across South-East Asia suspected of diverting the technology to Beijing.
It is impossible to know precisely why powerful men fall into honeytraps. Ego, poor judgement, vulnerability and sexual desire can all play a role. What makes the allegations involving Huang so striking is the suggestion that one of the world’s most important technology executives may nevertheless have been remarkably easy to compromise.
Ian Williams is the author of Vampire State: The Rise And Fall Of The Chinese Economy.
