Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang resigned on Thursday after a week of turmoil that began with reports of an affair with a woman US officials believe was passing information to the Chinese government, according to RNZ. The scandal has pulled an antique espionage tool, the so-called honey trap, back into the headlines, and it raises uncomfortable questions about how vulnerable even the world's most powerful technology companies are to the oldest trick in the spy playbook.
Beijing has dismissed the allegations against the woman, Alice Huang, who is of no relation to the executive, as “groundless speculation”. Many details remain unclear, including how and when she may have been recruited, and whether any information ever changed hands. But the affair lands at a delicate moment in the US-China race to dominate artificial intelligence, and its consequences could reach well beyond one boardroom in California.
What is a honey trap?
The image is straight out of a Bond film: a charming stranger, feigned affection, secrets extracted over pillow talk. The reality, according to the intelligence veterans quoted by CNN, is both more mundane and more unsettling.
“The lack of judgment of a CEO of one of the most important companies in the world having an affair with someone who is allegedly an agent of the Communist Party is very striking,” said Isaac Stone Fish, founder of the business intelligence firm Strategy Risks.
“Perhaps he never shared any important information with her at all. But it's the existence of (that relationship) that is a problem in itself.”
John Sipher, a former CIA officer who served in Asia and Europe and is now a senior fellow at the Michael V. Hayden Center for Intelligence, Policy and International Security, said every intelligence service targets people with access to valuable information. Authoritarian states simply have more leverage to recruit them.
“What the Chinese and Russians and others can do is, they can use much more manipulation and pressure to recruit a spy,” Sipher said. “They can say, 'Listen, we won't let you return home, or you won't be able to see your family, unless you work with us'.”
Three ways the trap is laid
The cinematic version, a trained agent who seduces a target from the start, is the rarest, Sipher said. Its most famous real-life example was the Mossad operative posing as an American tourist named “Cindy”, who seduced and then abducted Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who had leaked secrets of Israel's undeclared nuclear programme to the British press.
The more common method is blackmail: a target is lured into a compromising situation, and an intelligence agency “sweeps in and says, 'Well, we can arrest you or you can help us out',” said Peter Mattis, president of the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based defence policy think tank.
The third and most probable scenario is quieter. A person organically begins a relationship with someone of interest to an intelligence service. The agency notices, then recruits the partner, through incentive or coercion, to collect information. Nobody is wearing a tuxedo. The vulnerability is simply human intimacy.
From Romeo spies to a Peking opera singer
These tactics are nothing new. East Germany famously trained handsome, charming men as “Romeo spies” during the Cold War, and Sipher said Soviet operatives did it “all the time”, knocking on the hotel doors of Western diplomats and journalists.
One case from the 1960s to the 1980s still beggars belief. Shi Pei Pu, a male Peking opera singer, convinced the Beijing-based French diplomat Bernard Boursicot that he was a woman, and a clandestine romance followed. Shi maintained the deception for nearly two decades, even claiming to have borne Boursicot's son; the boy was in fact a Uyghur child sold by his impoverished mother, according to archival New York Times reports. When China's secret service threatened Shi's safety, Boursicot passed French embassy documents to Beijing for years before the pair were arrested in France and eventually pardoned.
In the early 2000s, Chinese-American businesswoman Katrina Leung, whom the FBI had been paying to spy on China, turned out to be a double agent feeding classified material to Beijing while romantically involved with two FBI agents, including her own handler. Under a plea deal she served no more than three months in jail.
Why the Nvidia case matters for the AI race
Sipher estimates honey traps succeed only about 10 percent of the time. But, as he put it, “in the spy business, you only need to get a couple key people in key places.”
Artificial intelligence has made every C-suite in the sector a target. “It enables manufacturing and enables scientific discovery, it enables social control, it enables military targeting,” Mattis said. “You could go across the industry and realise that any of the leadership of these companies, anyone in the C-suite of these companies is likely to be an intelligence target.”
The targeting is also far broader than American executives. Chinese spies “go after everybody”, Sipher said, naming Australians, Vietnamese and Singaporeans, while Stone Fish noted similar tactics are likely aimed at Japanese, Korean and European targets, and that Chinese companies use honeypots against domestic corporate rivals too.
China, for its part, warns its own citizens of the same danger. Its State Security Ministry said in 2024 it had detected cases of foreign espionage using “online romance and dating as a point of entry”, and that operatives disguise their identities and engineer “seemingly 'fateful encounters'”, Yahoo News reported.
What happens next?
Stone Fish said the Nvidia fallout threatens to deepen mutual mistrust between Washington and Beijing, at a time when the world's two largest economies are competing over a technology that touches everything from manufacturing to military targeting. For a New Zealand economy deeply tied to both, that mistrust is not a distant abstraction.
The uncomfortable truth, as Mattis and Stone Fish both acknowledged, is that anyone can be a target. Romantic, platonic or professional relationships can all be exploited, and the only foolproof defence is hermithood, which is no defence at all for people running companies or countries.
“You're a target. Don't be foolish. And be sure to ask questions,” Mattis said.
Frequently asked questions
What is a honey trap in espionage?
It is an intelligence operation that uses a romantic or sexual relationship, often built through seduction, blackmail or coercion of a partner, to extract secrets from a target.
Why did Jensen Huang resign from Nvidia?
He resigned on Thursday after a week of turmoil sparked by reports of an affair with a woman US officials believe was passing information to the Chinese government, an allegation Beijing calls groundless.
How often do honey traps succeed?
Former CIA officer John Sipher estimates they succeed about 10 percent of the time, but intelligence services consider even one success in a hundred attempts a major win if the target has access to important secrets.