Nvidia Says AI Chips Don't Have Kill Switch, Calls Them Open Invitation To Disaster

No backdoors, no kill switches, no spyware. That's Nvidia's pledge after an accusation from the Cyberspace Administration of China, which asked Nvidia last week to provide documents about security vulnerabilities in Nvidia's H20 data center GPUs, specifically citing "backdoor" security risks. Nvidia responded officially with a blog post the company's chief security officer, David Reber Jr.

"Embedding backdoors and kill switches into chips would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors," Reber wrote. "It would undermine global data infrastructure and fracture trust in U.S. technology. Established law wisely requires companies to fix vulnerabilities--not create them."

The Cyberspace Administration of China's concerns stem specifically from the Nvidia's H20 GPU, which is made for the Chinese market and designed to comply with US export guidelines. Ars Technica notes that U.S. lawmakers are considering a Chip Security Act that would "require exported chips to be built with 'location verification,'" and "calls for an assessment of mechanisms to stop unauthorized use." In other words, a kill switch.

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