Nvidia's response to China: Kill switch would be "open invitation for disaster"
Nvidia firmly rejects accusations by the Chinese government. The company's own AI chips are said to have no backdoors.
Nvidia's AI accelerator H100. The modified Chinese version H20 is the focus of the kill switch allegations.
(Image: Nvidia)
AI accelerators from Nvidia should contain “no back doors, no kill switches, no spyware,” the company assures in a blog post. “That's not how trustworthy systems are built – and never will be.”
Nvidia is responding to accusations by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). It accused Nvidia of having built so-called kill switches and extensive tracking options into its accelerators. Kill switches refer to the ability to switch off hardware remotely and thus render it unusable. This could paralyze entire supercomputers.
Nvidia is committed to product security
“Kill switches and built-in backdoors create single points of failure and violate the fundamental principles of cybersecurity” continues the author, David Reber Jr. He is Chief Security Officer and Head of Product Security at Nvidia.
“There is no such thing as a 'good' secret backdoor – only dangerous vulnerabilities that need to be eliminated. Product security must always be done the right way: through rigorous internal testing, independent validation and full compliance with global cybersecurity standards.”
Reber Jr. calls a built-in kill switch a “permanent flaw beyond user control, and an open invitation for disaster. It's like buying a car where the dealership keeps a remote control for the parking brake – just in case they decide you shouldn't be driving. That's not sound policy. It's an overreaction that would irreparably harm America's economic and national security interests.”
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Accusations partly provoked by the USA
China's accusations followed a US bipartisan bill to build tracking capabilities into AI chips. The initiators argue that this is intended to suppress the black and gray trade in corresponding hardware in China. However, this law has not yet been passed.
Regarding the kill switch, the CAC referred to “experts in the field of artificial intelligence” without naming them.
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