Last Sunday, Nvidia chief Jensen Huang dropped a bombshell. In an email to staff, he admitted an affair with Alice Huang, an executive of Megaspeed, a Singapore-based data-centre company US officials suspect of helping route restricted chips to China. “There is no excuse for what I did,” he wrote. The New York Times reported that the US government identified her as working for China’s Ministry of State Security, recruited to push for Nvidia’s chips to reach China.AI is a permanent shift, not a market theme. Last week, the markets showed how much rides on it: One US election wiped $2.5 to $3 trillion off AI stocks in a day, owing to fears of tighter rules for data centres. Investors were reacting to something governments grasped earlier. AI has become the geopolitical battleground of the decade, and the contest is over compute. The New York Times found that some Chinese firms Washington cleared to handle H200s had offices that appeared unused. Every route to this technology, whether a shipment, a model, an engineer or an executive, is now a target.AdvertisementWhat Jensen has confirmed is the relationship. It is not an aberration: If US officials are right, it is just the newest instance of a strategy decades old.Also Read | Beyond Nvidia, larger lessons from ‘key man risk’After this story broke, I posted, “Why invest in R&D when you can get that tech through a honey trap?”. Behind the intended sarcasm was a real question. For three decades Western democracies assumed openness would be reciprocated. They opened their markets, universities, laboratories and talent networks, expecting China to converge towards their rules. In turn, China opened only selectively, but relentlessly harvested the West’s openness.In 2003, Cisco sued Huawei, alleging the latter’s router software contained its source code, down to identical bugs. Huawei conceded in court papers that some of its code came from an outside and unauthorised source. A court-appointed expert concluded in 2004 that Cisco code had been electronically copied into the Huawei product. The case settled on confidential terms, the code removed and, on public record, there was no formal admission of liability. But the record speaks for itself.AdvertisementNortel was another warning. Investigators found hackers using seven stolen executive passwords, the CEO’s included, roamed its network from at least 2000, with data flowing to Shanghai. Nortel went bankrupt in 2009 as Huawei rose. Investigators blamed the Chinese government, not Huawei; Beijing and Huawei denied involvement.Several are allegations, which Beijing denies, but the pattern across decades and methods is the point. A senior US intelligence official told The Times of London that rivals, especially China, practise “social espionage”, using people posing as investors, researchers and romantic partners. In the AI era, the open door is an API key, a LinkedIn request, a dinner invitation.The strategy is not confined to software and chips. China, Pakistan and North Korea each built their most dangerous capabilities partly by obtaining, by whatever route, what the rules would deny them.Pakistan’s bomb began with a theft: In 1975, A Q Khan left the Netherlands, where he had worked for a contractor to the enrichment consortium URENCO, carrying stolen centrifuge designs. According to arms-control analyses, China gave Pakistan a nuclear weapon design and training. Khan then ran a network of front companies selling centrifuges and know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea. China’s own record is in Washington’s files: The 1999 Cox Committee concluded that China obtained classified information on the US W88 warhead through espionage; a finding Beijing rejected. For us in India this is not academic; it has created real threats, since two of the three are our neighbours.In 2018, I argued that the future of technology must be shaped, and controlled, by coalitions of trusted partners: Nations that share values, respect rule of law, protect intellectual property and believe in innovation rather than appropriation. That architecture is only now being built. Belatedly. Pax Silica, launched in December 2025, brings trusted countries together to secure the chip, AI and critical-minerals supply chain. India signed the declaration in February, alongside Japan, South Korea, the UK, Singapore and others.But is this enough, since we know that the alleged channel in the Huang case ran through a company in Singapore, itself a member? Trust must be verified, not declared. A Trust Coalition also needs shared counterintelligence. Brief executives, researchers and officials on approach tactics, flag procurement fronts, share findings. There needs to be transparency on who owns compute with beneficial ownership of data-centre operators, resellers and chip buyers visible to every member’s regulators.The principle of reciprocity is also important. Openness for those who reciprocate, scrutiny for those who do not. Lastly, there must be penalties that deter, not fines absorbed as a cost of doing business.None of this argues for closing the door. Open societies are strong because they are open: They attract the best talent and ideas and win by out-innovating. I’m not arguing that all of China’s technology is stolen. But its tech credibility, built on exploiting others’ trust, is also a violation. The answer is to open the door to partners we can verify.The Huang story will be treated as a scandal, and scandals are noise. The signal is the pattern behind it, and a world that must now decide whether to protect what it is building.Technology can be stolen. It must not be. Its credibility has to be earned, and only trusted partners can earn it together.The writer, former Member of Parliament and Minister of State for Electronics & Information Technology, Skills and Entrepreneurship, Government of India, is BJP Keralam State President and MLA for Nemom. He began his career as a chip designer. Views are personal