With the departure of Jensen Huang, the artificial intelligence industry in Washington is losing its most powerful supporter
The removal of Jensen Huang as Nvidia’s chief executive leaves a vacuum in Washington, where he has been one of the strongest bulwarks against artificial intelligence regulation.
Mr. Huang, a confidant of President Trump, successfully campaigned to open sales channels for AI chips to China. He also argued against AI safety regulations, which he said could hold back American companies in the global race against competitors. And he pushed for the adoption of open source technology, in which the underlying computer code for artificial intelligence models is made public.
He mostly got his way.
Now that Mr. Huang is gone, bipartisan outrage is mounting over the national security threats posed by allegations of his affair with a Chinese spy. The Nvidia co-founder’s Washington agenda — and the White House officials who supported it — are under attack.
Voters last week swept Democrats who promised tighter regulation of AI into office. And a growing chorus of industry voices are warning that the technology has become too dangerous and that the government must step in to protect the public from rogue AI agents and economic disruption.
Mr. Huang has a “unique” influence on US AI policy, said Samuel Hammond, director of superintelligence policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, a right-leaning think tank focused on tech issues.
“His No. 1 prerogative was to gain access to the China market, by hook or by crook,” said Mr. Hammond, a critic of Nvidia’s efforts to curb export controls.
Mr. Huang’s prominence as Mr. Trump’s AI whisperer has grown over the past two years as the technology has exploded in popularity and Nvidia has become the world’s most valuable company. Tech giants have helped fuel the U.S. economy, lift markets and invest tens of billions of dollars in building AI infrastructure.
Mr. Huang and other tech executives have also become close to the administration. They attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration and pledged multibillion-dollar manufacturing projects to support the president’s economic agenda.
Some — including Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, and Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta — have become powerful voices influencing the administration. Mr. Musk and Mr. Zuckerberg have often sided with Mr. Huang to push back on AI safety rules and become more involved with Chinese AI companies, according to three people familiar with their interactions.
Now, more pro-regulation voices are likely to fill the gap left by Mr. Huang. AI start-up Anthropic has been critical of chip exports to China. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Demis Hassabis, head of Google DeepMind, called for a non-governmental independent agency to set standards and test security.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and others in the White House have pushed for greater enforcement of AI chip export rules. And Senators Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana, have in recent weeks called for an end to chip sales to China through restrictions in the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual budget approved by Congress for the Defense Department.
Any reduction in exports would be compounded by a potential legislative investigation into negotiations between Nvidia and top Trump administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, over easing restrictions on AI chip exports to China. In May, Mr. Lutnick received a classified intelligence memo warning about Mr. Jensen’s affair with Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore data center company Megaspeed, who is suspected of being a Chinese spy. Without Mr. Huang and with few allies, Nvidia is vulnerable, analysts said.
“Jensen and Nvidia were very dependent on the president’s support in their approach, and they didn’t have many other friends because of the kind of scorched earth that deals with so many of these issues,” said Chris McGuire, senior fellow for China and emerging technologies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior State Department adviser. “That’s a risky place.
Nvidia and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Google and Anthropic declined to comment. The White House did not immediately comment.
Mr. Huang, who founded Nvidia in 1993, has been a reluctant figure in Washington politics for years. That changed after the Biden administration introduced rules in 2022 to block the export of AI chips to China and limit sales of the chips to other countries, a direct shot at Nvidia, the industry’s dominant company.
In Washington, intelligence officials and experts across the political spectrum have grown increasingly concerned about China’s potential to overtake the United States in the development of artificial intelligence, which they say could lead to the Chinese government’s authoritarian use of artificial intelligence. Months after the new Trump administration took office in 2025, government officials began considering expanding the ban on the export of Biden AI chips.
Mr. Huang swung into action. Courting officials including David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Trump’s top adviser on artificial intelligence, he warned that any restrictions on US chipmakers would only strengthen Chinese chip companies like Huawei.
In April 2025, the Trump administration introduced new restrictions on chip exports. In July 2025, Mr. Huang met with Mr. Trump in the Oval Office and urged him to reverse course. Despite warnings from national security officials, the administration lifted export controls.
“Jensen has been one of the loudest voices advocating the sale of advanced AI chips to China,” said Ben Buchanan, former special adviser to the Biden White House on AI. “This hands-off approach is exactly what China wants.”
Nvidia’s presence in Washington has grown rapidly with Mr. Huang. The company spent $4.97 million on federal lobbying in 2025, up from $640,000 a year earlier, according to the nonpartisan group OpenSecrets. In the first three quarters of this year, it spent $4.69 million on lobbying.
Mr. Huang’s influence was on display again this year as the United States rushed to respond to the growing capabilities of China’s open-source AI models, which are making their source code or underlying computations available to the public.
Some AI companies have expressed concern that Chinese developers have illegally built their products by lifting from American models. But Mr. Huang defended the open source models in private conversations with administration officials and lawmakers including Senators Jon Husted, Republican of Ohio, and Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia.
In August, the White House unveiled a new framework for evaluating whether advanced AI models pose a risk to national security — and it didn’t include open models.
At the same time, the artificial intelligence industry was working with White House officials on a self-regulatory security framework, according to three people with knowledge of the plans.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have backed the idea of a standards and testing agency modeled after the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a non-governmental body that enforces standards for financial institutions. The companies were in talks with White House officials who were working to submit a draft framework to the president for approval, the people said.
Mr. Huang and Mr. Zuckerberg were critics of the plan and lobbied for promises from the companies to test their models for safety, the people said. In late September, days before AI chiefs were called to the White House for an announcement, the idea of a testing body was scrapped. Instead, the president announced that the companies have promised to create more secure systems without a surveillance agency.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, alleging copyright infringement on news content related to AI systems. Both companies denied the claims.)
In October, Mr. Trump awarded Mr. Huang the National Medal of Science. The president praised Mr. Huang as “years and years ahead of other people and other companies” and Nvidia’s chips as the “backbone” of AI development. Afterward, Mr. Huang lingered on the stage with the president, chatting and smiling.