A longtime intelligence analyst warns that President Donald Trump's close ties to a tech mogul may have handed China an espionage jackpot.
CNN chief law enforcement and intelligence analyst John Miller said on Tuesday's episode of "The Arena with Kasie Hunt" that Chinese intelligence may have gained a rare window into U.S. artificial intelligence policy through a woman believed to be a spy who was romantically involved with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Miller described Huang as having become "the AI whisperer to the president of the United States."
"I can't begin to frame the enormity of this," Miller said.
He compared the alleged operation to Israel's attack on Hezbollah, in which pagers were rigged with explosives and detonated at once, calling it one of the great intelligence coups and saying "this comes right alongside that."
Miller said a spy with that kind of proximity to Huang could pass along information that would be out of reach "even if you had recruited a source in the Oval Office," because of Huang's conversations with Trump about AI strategy and regulation. Miller suggested that would give Chinese President Xi Jinping's intelligence service what Miller called "decision advantage."
"That's intelligence gold," he said.
Miller noted that Huang has argued on CNN against restricting chip sales to China and persuaded Trump to let China buy older chips. He also pointed to reporting by The New York Times that Commerce Department investigators who visited the woman's company found many chips still in their shipping packaging, which the investigators saw as a possible sign the hardware was headed to China.
"This was a multilevel platform that China was able to exploit," Miller said, adding that the intelligence community had been tracking the matter since 2024 or 2025.
Hunt cited the Times' report that Secretary of State and national security adviser Marco Rubio warned Trump in May, aboard Air Force One, that Huang was involved with a suspected Chinese spy. The warning came shortly before Huang joined Trump's trip to Beijing at the president's invitation.
Miller urged viewers to look past what he called "the salacious nature" of the alleged affair.
"Let's just stick with the intel implications here, which are huge," he said.
He questioned whether Trump would have warned Huang privately or whether intelligence officials wanted to keep monitoring the relationship rather than shut it down.
"We don't know these answers," Miller said.
