Nvidia's chief security officer has published a blog post claiming that GPUs “should not have a kill switch or a backdoor.” Amidst pressure from both sides of the Pacific, some US lawmakers are pushing Nvidia to grant government backdoors to AI chips, but Chinese officials have argued that they already exist.
“To mitigate the risk of misuse, some experts and policymakers suggest that they require hardware “kill switches” or built-in controls that remotely disable GPUs without user knowledge and consent.
“There's no such thing as a 'good' secret backdoor,” Reber Jr. argues, “it's just a dangerous vulnerability that needs to be eliminated.” He continues to call the killing switch “public invitation to disasters” before making it clear that his intended audience is US policymakers.
Both Nvidia and the US government hope that the company will become the dominant supplier of AI chips to China, but suggestions for direct access to hardware could put that at risk. Chinese chip companies are steadily improving their performance and production capacity as China is looking for homemade alternatives. This increases the likelihood that Nvidia will be taken in the market by Huawei, who knows one or two things about losing market share on suspicion of government access.
