Bodyguards aren’t enough: After Jensen Huang’s exit, CEOs need counterintelligence training

Detailed summary

Jensen Huang's resignation and a bugged OpenAI conference room show espionage has reached the C-suite.

This month, Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of Nvidia after acknowledging an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials suspect is a Chinese intelligence asset. Nvidia’s board said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” and China has denied the allegations.

A month earlier, OpenAI’s countermeasures team found a listening device in a San Francisco conference room where executives often held sensitive discussions. The FBI later arrested an OpenAI employee accused of planting it.

To most people, espionage belongs in spy thrillers. For C-suite executives, corporate espionage and executive targeting are a growing threat. Companies once seen as untouchable now face foreign espionage and physical targeting.

The problem isn’t awareness or money. Today’s executives have to change how they live, travel, and interact with the people around them to prepare for adversaries.

Big tech companies already spend millions on executive security. Nvidia, No. 16 on the 2026 Fortune 500, spent nearly $4 million protecting Huang in fiscal 2026, according to Fortune‘s analysis of company filings, up from $3.5 million in 2024.

The December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk reminded S&P 500 companies that security reaches well beyond cybersecurity. Since then, spending has climbed. About 38% of S&P 500 companies provided security perks to at least some executives in 2025, up from 28% in 2023, according to an early look at proxy filings by executive data firm Equilar.

AI companies are a growing target for competitors and foreign governments, said Michael Evanoff, global chief security officer at physical security company Verkada and a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security.

“It is also especially vulnerable because it is an emerging industry and has not yet built the security muscle memory of other consequential, DOD-aligned industries like aerospace, defense and critical…

That…

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