Could Jensen Huang Make a Comeback?
In The News
The search for Nvidia’s next chief executive is being pulled in two directions. The Financial Times reported on Friday that the board had approached Arm chief executive Rene Haas as a possible successor. Nvidia said it has not formally engaged any candidate and is still choosing a search firm. Reuters said it could not independently verify the report that the board approached Haas.
At the same time, two large shareholders asked the board to slow down and keep open the return of Jensen Huang. Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital, and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, wrote that the board should pursue a slow, measured and deliberate process that leaves all options on the table, including the potential return of Jensen Huang. Their funds held about $2.1 billion of Nvidia stock at the end of June. The letter does not ask for Huang to be reinstated now, and it says the final call belongs to the board. Nvidia has not answered the letter in public.
Elon Musk said on Friday that he is signing a petition that asks the board to bring Huang back while an independent investigation runs its course. The petition, called Stand with Jensen, also asks the board to give an evidence-based reason if it keeps him out. The names on it are self-reported and unverified, and the organizers said on Saturday they were removing false entries, so no total is printed here.
On Friday, one letter that claimed to be from Nvidia employees demanded the board’s resignation. It was not written by Nvidia staff. Its words were copied, almost word for word, from the letter OpenAI employees sent their board in 2023, after that board fired chief executive Sam Altman.
Nvidia’s board opened its own investigation on November 8, before Huang resigned, and hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen and Katz and former acting United States Attorney Joon H. Kim. No timeline has been given. Harvey Jones, the former chief executive of Synopsys, is now the board’s first chair. Interim chief executive Colette Kress runs the company, and Nvidia reports third-quarter results on Tuesday, November 17.
The board has not answered the shareholders in Santa Clara. In Singapore, the ministry put its own record straight.
So Much for a Deadline
The House deadline passed on Friday night. No answer came.
The chairs of three House committees told Jensen Huang to answer in writing by 8 p.m. Eastern on Friday, 5 p.m. Pacific, or face a subpoena. As of Saturday afternoon, neither Huang nor Nvidia’s general counsel, Tim Teter, had given a public answer, and no subpoena had been issued.
The dates stand as requests, not settled appearances. The House asked Huang to sit for a closed-door interview, in private, with a written record, on December 1. It asked Teter to sit for the same kind of interview on December 2. The Senate Banking Committee asked Huang to testify at a public hearing on December 3, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on December 10.
Lutnick has agreed to come on his own for December 10. The briefing Huang agreed to before Thanksgiving, announced by House Foreign Affairs Chairman Brian Mast, is still being negotiated, so one appearance could come sooner than December 1.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Friday that Treasury, State, Defense and the office of the United States Trade Representative had backed adding Megaspeed to an export-control list for months, while Commerce controlled the process. Lutnick runs Commerce.
Huang has not answered to Washington.
The Passport, Corrected
On November 12, Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry published its record of Alice Huang. Nothing clears her.
Police questioned her on June 24, 2025, and seized her passport the same day. The ministry said its investigation suspected false declarations about server purchases during her time as an executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company under investigation over Nvidia chip purchases. It was not an espionage investigation.
In February 2026, the ministry found too little evidence that she had committed any offence connected to the declarations, and she was not charged. It returned her passport, and she left Singapore the same day. She was given a stern warning and is barred from returning. The ministry also found that parts of what she told police were untrue, and that she had played down her role at Megaspeed.
In Washington, Attorney General Todd Blanche said Thursday that the Justice Department has not reached a conclusion on whether Alice Huang is a spy. China denies it.
No new finding has come from Malaysia. Its Trade Ministry is still working with customs to determine whether AI chips imported by Speedmatrix, the Malaysian unit of Megaspeed, were sent to another country, and whether that complied with the law.
The chips are still being traced in Singapore and Malaysia. In San Francisco, the companies that build the AI those chips run are heading for a reckoning of their own.
Anthropic Goes to Market as a Defendant
Anthropic will set the price of its first public share sale on Wednesday, November 18, and start trading on the Nasdaq as ANT on Thursday, November 19.
The company is selling 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each. The sale could value Anthropic at about $1 trillion, or about $1.4 trillion counting all shares. Investors asked for an estimated six times more shares than the offer. Seven companies, including Google, Nvidia and Microsoft, have agreed to buy $26 billion more in a private sale alongside it.
On Friday, the company’s own tool failed twice. Claude, its AI assistant, went down in the morning with login errors, then again later in the day with wider errors across the app, the programming interface, Claude Code and its connectors. Service was restored the same day.
Thursday, Anthropic was named in a suit in San Francisco court. Four nonprofit groups ask a judge to bar Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI and the AI division of SpaceX from building or deploying anything more capable than their best systems as of November 12. Their lawyer is Matthew Platkin, the former attorney general of New Jersey. The groups argue the companies admit they cannot reliably control their own models. No hearing date has been set. No case number has been published. None of the five companies has answered the claim in court. Meta declined to comment.
The court in San Francisco has not set a date. In Ukraine, the archive that trains AI weapons has already moved on to its next step.
Wars rage on and AI is playing a role.
The man who built Ukraine’s battlefield archive has formed a fund to deploy a fully autonomous AI weapon next year. Mykhailo Fedorov, the former Ukrainian defense minister who directed the building of Avengers Labs, is raising the fund, and Alex Karp, the chief executive of the data company Palantir, is a lead investor. The New York Times reported it on Thursday.
Avengers Labs holds more than five million annotated battlefield frames, most of them drone footage, gathered through Ukraine’s Delta battlefield system. Ukraine is opening the archive to defense companies in allied countries at no charge, to train AI weapons. Up to 12 British companies are first in line. Any firm that trains a model on the archive must license what it builds back to the Ukrainian military. The license carries no human rights clause.
Both Russia and Ukraine have already used small numbers of fully autonomous exploding drones. One Russian model killed three people in a southern Ukrainian city in July.
The Convention on Conventional Weapons meets in Geneva from Monday, November 16, to Friday, November 20. It will decide whether to open negotiations on autonomous weapons.
Editorial
The deadline passed and nobody answered. Congress set December dates, and Huang said nothing in public about his. Silence is not an answer. It is a position, and the chairs will have to decide what it costs.
In Santa Clara, the board is pulled two ways at once, toward a successor and back toward the founder. The shareholders who wrote did not ask for Huang back. They asked for time, and for the facts first. That is the soberest line in the whole affair.
In Singapore, the record was corrected, and the correction mattered. A woman investigated for false declarations is not a spy, and the ministry said so. The Justice Department has not decided. The difference between those two sentences is the difference between a fact and a suspicion.
In Ukraine, the man who built the archive of a war now raises money for a weapon that decides alone. The archive was the training ground. The fund is the next step. Geneva decides next week whether the world will even talk about it.
Waiting is not the same as deciding. But this week, the waiting itself became the story, and the decisions now have dates. Tuesday, the earnings call. Wednesday, the share price. Thursday, the first trade. December, the testimony. The week began with a resignation. It ends with a calendar full of other people’s dates.