Nvidia Denounces Backdoors as China Makes Accusations About AI Chips

China’s Cyberspace Administration grabbed headlines recently when it accused Nvidia of putting backdoors in the series of AI chips that it is approved to sell there. Nvidia has shot back not just at those accusations, but seemingly at US legislators that have been floating the idea of mandating spyware in equipment that could wind up in the hands of foreign rivals.

Nvidia’s refutation of the accusations came in the form of both official company statements and a more in-depth blog post by Chief Security Officer David Reber, who invoked the “Clipper Chip” debacle of the 1990s as an example of the futility of state-mandated backdoors in tech. China is nevertheless asking representatives from Nvidia to answer to their accusations of location tracking and a remote “kill switch” that they claim to have discovered with assistance from US-based researchers.

Renewed push for government backdoors rejected by prominent tech firms

Nvidia’s wholesale rejection of the idea of hardware backdoors should be unsurprising, as it echoes longstanding general sentiment in the big tech industry. Prior smaller-scale experiments, beginning with the Clipper Chip in the mid-90s, have tended to end disastrously. Hackers quickly found a way to shut the Clipper backdoor to the NSA, and later experiments by RSA ended with Chinese hackers penetrating their software and making use of the backdoors for their own purposes.

But the pressure is on because of the AI dominance race, and the most advanced AI chips are one of the most important elements. Nvidia makes the most advanced chips, and the US has slapped export controls on its best lines. It has toyed with the idea of a full ban on AI chips being provided to China, but Nvidia successfully lobbied for the continued sale of its special “H20” line for the region citing importance of competing in the Chinese market and the fact that competitors like Huawei already make AI chips of comparable capability available there. China technically does not have access to Nvidia’s very best products, but has been able to successfully smuggle some quantity in via an assortment of third countries.

US government seeks “security features” for AI chips

The Chip Security Act is up for consideration in Congress, and calls for a minimum of location tracking features being added to AI chips that are on the export control list. The language suggests more than just this, however, with it also allowing a range of other security measures that are not specifically defined as of yet.

At the end of the day, tech firms will fight to do what is best for their company; Nvidia lobbied to keep H20 sales going in China because it makes billions of dollars quarterly on them, and Apple earlier this year rejected a UK government demand for backdoors into its encrypted cloud storage by simply pulling the feature from the country. While the Snowden leaks of 2013 clearly demonstrate that the NSA has had some success in striking secret deals of this nature with particular tech companies, it would be a big surprise if China’s accusations against Nvidia turned out to be accurate.