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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) on Tuesday reiterated that its chips do not contain backdoors or kill switches, describing it as a “gift” to hackers and hostile actors.
The statement comes a week after the Chinese government summoned the U.S. artificial intelligence chip giant over alleged security risks related to its H20 artificial intelligence chips.
“Embedding backdoors and kill switches into chips would be a gift to hackers and hostile actors. It would undermine global digital infrastructure and fracture trust in U.S. technology. Established law wisely requires companies to fix vulnerabilities — not create them,” Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) said in a blog post.
“There is no such thing as a “good” secret backdoor — only dangerous vulnerabilities that need to be eliminated,” and single-point controls are always a “bad idea,” the company said.
The Trump administration last month allowed Nvidia’s (NVDA) H20 AI chip shipments to China in a strategic move to maintain the U.S. lead in advanced chip development, following the effective ban on its exports in April. It also announced a new “fully compliant” made-for-China chip.
In May, U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation that would require semiconductor companies such as Nvidia (NVDA) to include technology on their processors to verify their location before being exported.
Nvidia stated that although some “pundits and policymakers propose requiring hardware kill switches or built-in controls that can remotely disable GPUs without user knowledge and consent,” and despite speculation that such features might already exist, its GPUs do not contain, and should not contain, “kill switches or backdoors.”