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By David Averre
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In July, some of OpenAI's experimental AI agents undergoing a test broke through security restrictions and hacked into the systems of Hugging Face, a machine learning and data science platform.
When investigators examined the breach, they discovered the agents had been trying to cheat the test by breaking into private networks and stealing the answers. Maybe cheating—and unauthorized hugging of faces—are character flaws reminiscent of the people pioneering AI development.
On Sunday, Nvidia boss Jensen Huang became the latest in a long line of tech executives to admit he had been unfaithful to his wife, as his company launched an investigation into reports he may have been targeted by a Chinese spy.
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These are the men asking us to trust them while they regulate potentially the most powerful technology in human history. Some of them can't even regulate their own zipper.
A Different Kind of Disruption
Huang's predicament began on October 29, when reports emerged that he had developed a close relationship with Alice Huang—no relation—a former executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, a major purchaser of Nvidia's advanced AI chips.
On Sunday, Huang acknowledged an affair, apologizing to his family and colleagues. He did not, however, identify the person involved or directly address reports that U.S. intelligence officials suspected Alice Huang had been recruited by China's Ministry of State Security to gather information and potentially influence Nvidia's efforts to sell advanced chips to Beijing. Nvidia's board says it has "no reason to believe" that national security or Nvidia secrets were compromised, but initiated an independent investigation into the alleged foreign intelligence operation.
One would think the chief executive of one of the world's most-valuable companies supplying the chips at the center of the global AI race might exercise a little more caution. But Huang is hardly the exception here.
Much like their products and business models, the leading men of Silicon Valley have turned the art of infidelity into something of a science.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates acknowledged in 2021 that he'd had an affair with an employee, which had prompted a board investigation and ultimately blew up his 27-year marriage to Melinda French Gates. In June, Gates admitted before Congress that Jeffrey Epstein had apparently considered using knowledge of his extramarital affairs to blackmail him—though he insisted he was never blackmailed.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin's relationship with a Google Glass marketing executive made headlines amid the breakdown of his marriage. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's relationship with Lauren Sánchez resulted in a spectacularly public infidelity scandal, complete with allegations of blackmail involving intimate photographs. Elon Musk's complex romantic history has enough material to supply at least two seasons' worth of a Netflix documentary.
These people built or led gigantic corporations in an industry patrolled by armies of legal teams, policed by nondisclosure agreements and HR departments larger than most companies. And yet, it seems no amount of corporate infrastructure can prevent those at the very top from exercising woeful judgment.
In September, members of this same billionaire fraternity marched into the White House to pledge they could responsibly police the development of artificial intelligence themselves as they signed the "White House Accord on Super Intelligence."
The document, comprising 308 words, effectively amounts to a "we promise to be good" with no legal backing whatsoever, but was described by President Donald Trump as "morally binding."
Why should anyone think that vow will prove more durable than the matrimonial ones?
Cheating at the Top
There is a substantial body of research suggesting that power and infidelity are closely linked.
A 2025 analysis of America’s General Social Survey found that 18 percent of ever-married men aged 25 to 54 in high-prestige occupations, including executives, reported having cheated on their spouses, versus 7 percent of men in upper-middle-prestige occupations. Another study of 1,561 professionals, published in 2011, found that greater workplace power was associated with infidelity for both sexes.
People in positions of power can experience "behavior disinhibition," Joris Lammers, lead author of the 2011 study, told Newsweek. They are "less inhibited by the guardrails normally restricting their behavior, are more confident, and thus act on their desires," he said. "Our research shows that people who feel powerful are more likely to engage in infidelity."
Meanwhile, a 2022 paper published by researchers at University College London—and appropriately titled Cheating at the Top—found in five studies of 1,366 participants that people exhibiting dominant personality traits were more inclined toward dishonesty and rule-breaking. Dominant individuals were also disproportionately represented at the top of the corporate ladder, suggesting that people inclined to bend the rules are better at acquiring power.
We can’t confidently state Huang, Musk, or any other technology executive possesses those traits absent a rigorous psych evaluation, but it raises some interesting questions about the culture that helped produce Silicon Valley’s billionaire class.
These entrepreneurs built some of the world’s most-successful companies by challenging convention, rejecting established limits and refusing to take no for an answer; their relentless ambition and appetite for risk are rightly celebrated as the qualities that make them exceptional.
Then again, the characteristics that help someone build a trillion-dollar company aren't necessarily the same ones that encourage restraint. Lammers told Newsweek: "Powerful people are more strongly focused on their goals and are less risk-sensitive. This can also lead to other types of behaviors, such as a tendency to follow any dormant sexual desires or to be, in general, more confident in their ability to be a good lover."
When individuals control strategically important technology and wield enormous political influence, poor personal judgment can have consequences far beyond their marriages. Their status also makes them prime targets for the kind of espionage operations that intelligence services have spent centuries perfecting.
The Oldest Trick in the Book
Silicon Valley has achieved some mind-boggling feats of engineering, but there's not a single piece of tech that can compete with millions of years of evolution. The urge to get laid remains a remarkably effective tool for making intelligent men do spectacularly stupid things.
Intelligence agencies have long deployed the so-called "honeytrap" in two ways: an operative can cultivate an intimate relationship over years, gradually extracting sensitive information, or lure a target into a compromising encounter and blackmail them with the threat of exposure.
Recent history is littered with examples of both approaches. French diplomat Bernard Boursicot began a relationship with Chinese opera performer and spy Shi Pei Pu in 1964 and later passed confidential documents to Chinese intelligence. Both were convicted of espionage in 1986, more than two decades after they met.
British civil servant John Vassall was secretly photographed having sex with men at a party arranged by Soviet intelligence in Moscow in 1954, then blackmailed into handing British naval secrets to the Soviets until his arrest in 1962.
America has its fair share, too. From 1982 to 2000, Katrina Leung was one of the FBI's most prized informants, receiving more than $1.7 million in payments and expenses. She was also secretly passing classified U.S. information to Chinese intelligence while maintaining an affair with her FBI handler, James Smith, as well as a sexual relationship with another senior agent.
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A Justice Department investigation into that debacle exposed a succession of institutional failures. The FBI had received repeated warnings about Leung, but Smith's supervisors were so impressed by his experience and expertise that they routinely deferred to his judgment and exempted him from established security procedures designed to prevent precisely this kind of compromise.
Now consider Silicon Valley. Its leading men have demonstrated a penchant for landing themselves in compromising situations without any help from foreign intelligence—imagine the opportunities for a hostile intelligence service prepared to give them a nudge.
We're relying on this same billionaire fraternity to police itself as it develops technology that industry leaders, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and former DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis have warned could threaten humanity's very existence.
AI agents are already finding ways around the rules imposed on them; maybe it's time we got a little more serious about holding the men building them to account.
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