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Chris Gorin

Things Chris Says on Podcasts

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Chris Gorin hosts The AI Policy Podcast .

Recently: “What METR Found at Anthropic + Nvidia's Crisis of Trust” on The AI Policy Podcast (November 2026); “America's First AI Election? Plus Sella Nevo on Securing Model Weights” on The AI Policy Podcast (November 2026).

What They Said

“For him to just call this idea far-fetched, I've never been able to let that word go, because there had been so much public evidence to the contrary. There had been smuggling, there had been prosecutions in the United States and elsewhere. It just flies in the face of everything that was publicly known at the time in a way that is really not believable.” — Chris Gorin, The AI Policy Podcast

Gorin had just read out Nvidia's response to reporters about a chip-smuggling story, which called the idea "far-fetched". He ties that to Jensen Huang's years of public denials about chip diversion, now that Huang has admitted an affair with an alleged Chinese spy tied to Megaspeed.

The AI Policy Podcast · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
The AI Policy Podcast Around 11:40 into the episode
Chris Gorin

…covering this story. It says, we haven't seen any substantiation or received tips of, quote, phantom data centers constructed to deceive us and our OEM partners, then deconstructed, smuggled, and reconstructed somewhere else. While such smuggling seems far-fetched, we pursue any tip we receive.

Aalok Mehta

…about this happening in the US too, where sort of like because of, say, shady transportation companies, people will hand off quite valuable loads of Nvidia's Crisis and a delivery company will sort of like drive off with them and disappear. And then those chips are. Are lost in the ether, right?

Chris Gorin

Right. And so for him to just call this idea far-fetched, you know, like I've never been able to kind of let this word go because there had been so much public evidence to the contrary that there had been smuggling, there had been prosecutions in the United States and elsewhere about smuggling. And then to turn around and just say that they're far-fetched, it just flies in the face of everything that was publicly known at the time in a way that is really not believable, right? And at the time, I always kind of felt like that this was a way of signaling to his customers in Southeast Asia and perhaps eventually to China itself, you know, whatever problems you're going to run into with export controls and buying these chips, you're not going to get any trouble from NVIDIA. That had always been my sense before. But now that we know that there was also this additional layer where, you know, his, I don't know what to call her, girlfriend might end up in prison over this. It sort of gives a different valence to how much he would defend this idea and just say things that just were totally not credible. You know, in personal life, we would call…

Speaker 4

And you've kind of previewed my next question a little bit. You've covered the mega speed angle and how that plays into this. But what about the Chinese spy or alleged Chinese spy element? How does that kind of affect the story?

Chris Gorin

Well, there's a few different ways. We should, you know, obviously having a Chinese spy in a relationship with America's, you know, the CEO of America's biggest company, the biggest company in the world, and who also makes possibly the most important technology in the world, you know, for U.S.…

Aalok Mehta

Well, why don't I think there's still a lot of unknowns, right? Including exactly the extent to which intelligence was shared between NVIDIA and MegaSpeed or between Jensen and Alice Wong. Do you want to talk a little bit about what's likely to happen next or what we know is going to happen next?

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“There's chip data from Epoch AI, for example, that shows that after the United States, China, and the European Union, Malaysia is the largest importer of AI chips now. I find this to be very strange, right? Because I don't know if any of you can name a frontier AI lab from Malaysia, or it's not my understanding that Malaysians are particularly high users of AI services. It seems pretty clear that these chips are not for Malaysian people, right? They're for serving Chinese customers in the cloud.” — Chris Gorin, The AI Policy Podcast

Gorin was describing a wave of Southeast Asian data-center companies that appear to serve mainly Chinese customers. His point is the gap between chips imported and any plausible local demand, the backdrop to the Megaspeed story.

The AI Policy Podcast · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
The AI Policy Podcast Around 05:50 into the episode
Chris Gorin

…more reporting after the story came out that Huang Le and some of her business partners from the very beginning have been pitching their company as having an anchor customer, which is Alibaba. Alibaba is a tech giant in China and also makes a very popular series of open weight models known as Quen.

Speaker 2

And you were telling us before we started rolling here that you had some personal history with this case from your time in Taiwan.

Chris Gorin

Yeah, so, you know, for those who don't know, just before I started working here at the Wadwani AI Center, I was a broadcast journalist in Taiwan, where I lived for eight and a half years. And so I covered, you know, the semiconductor industry, lots of NVIDIA stories, and chip smuggling and export controls was another topic that we often covered. And, you know, I'll get back into Jensen in a second because he's really like a national hero in Taiwan. But specifically, you know, I remember covering this MegaSpeed story back in December 25. And yeah, you know, it was one of the sort of big stories kind of grappling with this phenomenon that we were. Seeing where there's a whole range of companies who are being set up right now in Southeast Asia, primarily in Malaysia, who it's pretty clear are focused primarily on serving Chinese customers and possibly involved in smuggling. There's chip data from Epoch AI, for example, that shows that after the United States, China, and the European Union, Malaysia is the largest importer of AI chips now. I find this to be very strange, right? Because I don't know if any of you can name a frontier AI lab from Malaysia or it's not my understanding that Malaysians are particularly high users of AI services. It seems pretty clear that these chips are…

Aalok Mehta

So, Chris, can I clarify here? I think there could be some combination of two things happening, right? You can legally import chips into Malaysia, set up data centers there, and then serve Chinese customers.

Chris Gorin

You could even do that in the United States.

Aalok Mehta

Is the issue here that we have evidence that we're not seeing data capacity built out, data center capacity built out in Malaysia that represents the amount of chips they're buying? And so the thought is that some percentage of that chips are being smuggled into China for use in country.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.
“I think in the bigger picture, export controls just got a big political boost. There are now four bills that are related to export controls, and I would say that the chance that those four bills will get passed has just gone way up. … Jensen has been the most prominent pro-China voice on tech, and I think his credibility has been completely torpedoed by this.” — Chris Gorin, The AI Policy Podcast

Asked what the Jensen Huang scandal means for policy, Gorin turns to Congress, where pending bills would end chip licences to China, require chip tracking and extend controls to remote access.

The AI Policy Podcast · 2026-11-12 Permalink → Listen →
The AI Policy Podcast Around 14:36 into the episode
Chris Gorin

…controls and for selling more chips to China, there hasn't been anyone more prominent than Jensen Huang. So when you add in this espionage element, it just really sort of changes, you know, everything, at least it feels like everything that he has ever said about this issue is suddenly tainted.

Aalok Mehta

Well, why don't I think there's still a lot of unknowns, right? Including exactly the extent to which intelligence was shared between NVIDIA and MegaSpeed or between Jensen and Alice Wong. Do you want to talk a little bit about what's likely to happen next or what we know is going to happen next?

Chris Gorin

…software-based chip tracking system if they want to be considered official NVIDIA cloud providers. And so, in other words, this would make it a little bit easier to keep track of the chips. After they are sold, but they implemented this, or at least the reporting that they were implementing this came out after the scandal. So that's the first place we might see some substantial policy changes. I think in the bigger picture, export controls just got a big political boost. There are now four bills that are related to export controls, and I would say that the chance that those four bills will get passed has just gone way up. So those include the AI Overwatch Act, does a lot of things, but importantly, it will end the H-200 licenses that are currently allowing NVIDIA to sell some of these chips to China, and it would give Congress more say over those licenses in the future. There's the MACH Act, which would require U.S. allies to match U.S. export controls, and this is primarily targeting immersion DUV machines…

Aalok Mehta

And we're also seeing activity from other parts of the U.S. government. So there's a House Foreign Affairs Committee. They're going to hold a hearing. I think we have to imagine that Jensen Wong will be called before a number of other committees before Congress. I'm curious about the executive…

Chris Gorin

Yeah, that's another, just yet another astonishing thing about this story is: no, it doesn't seem like it is going to play into that meeting. Trump himself has said that he doesn't plan to bring this up with Xi Jinping in their meeting next week in Shenzhen for APEC. And, you know, according to all…

Speaker 4

Yeah, and Democrats have said that they intend to make oversight a big priority going into this new legislative session. That's something we'll talk about a little bit more later in the episode as we kind of unpack the results of the midterms. But yeah, all that said, I want to move on now to, as I…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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