Raphael Spannocchi

My Experience With the Leaders of the Jensen Coup At the start of 2025, numerous Washington, D.C. based NGOs began spreading the false rumor that DeepSeek smuggled 50,000 H100 GPUs. Speaking from firsthand experience, organized think tanks, PR firms, and lobbyists aggressively personally attacked anyone merely asking them to provide evidence. Call them the Export Controls Deep State, or if that’s too right-coded for you, use the Obama-administration term “Foreign Policy Blob”. The same charlatans are attempting a coup on Jensen Huang, the most indispensable CEO to America’s AI success. If we lost Sam, we have Dario. If we lost Dario, we have Demis. Nvidia is singular. The gap between Nvidia and AMD would be wider than the gap between OpenAI and Mistral, Europe’s top AI company whose models don’t rank in the top 40. This is an attempt to derail the most important company for the American AI industry. The entire coup against Jensen Huang can be halted by asking a single question. What evidence is there that Alice Huang is actually a Chinese spy? The answer, unsurprisingly, is absolutely zero. There is not even the pretense of a factual basis for the claim. “We made it the fuck up, and if you have a problem with that, what are you, pro-China?” Taking away this obvious falsehood, the coup against Jensen boils down to a celebrity tabloid headline. Moreover, without the entirely fabricated ‘national security relevance’, these tabloid headlines would be at best a weekend story in the New York Post. Another basic question: if there is evidence of ‘national security relevance’, why not charge Jensen? The basic answer: they lack even the evidence to justify a warrant. During my time in DC, I was advised repeatedly to stay on the good side of the Export Controls Deep State. I was added to many groups for boosting content spreading the 50,000 H100s conspiracy theory. In several groups, I asked whether there was any evidence behind this claim. One group administrator, who was and still is affiliated with Georgetown, explicitly told me to “focus on bolstering the narrative”. I later posted Patel’s pseudo-correction and was subsequently removed from all of these groups. What you need to understand about the Export Controls Deep State is that they have no incentive to be remotely honest, because they are entirely unaccountable. To this day, they provided zero evidence for their claim. Internet historians later traced the origin of this claim to a tweet by Dylan Patel of Semianalysis. Patel later said they lied about his tweet and that his claim counted legally obtained hardware. Affiliates of universities and think tanks promote these baseless claims and are taken seriously by the national press. In reality, their theories about Nvidia are as kooky as the guy who shot up Comet Pizza. The reason they succeed is not only because they are unaccountable, but because they constantly use their unaccountability to attack others. There are broader foreign policy implications to these observations about political power, but I will stick to what I witnessed firsthand. After Trump’s election, his administration began lifting the export control cap. Surprising no one informed about this policy, America widened our lead. Deepseek was closest to catching up to American models in January 2025, literally the moment of peak export controls. Based on communication with members of the administration, the evidence that a) the export controls were net negative and b) the export controls deep state was acting in bad faith, that as soon as the situation was described accurately, the administration began rolling them back. Part of this is because many of these NGOs are funded by foundations like Open Philanthropy / Coefficient Giving, who explicitly intend to harm American AI companies because they believe American AI will “cause human extinction”. As a result, the BIS under the Biden administration was used as an informal cudgel against AI companies, both to censor in favor of their worldview, as seen in the Gemini scandal, as well as to backdoor regulation to slow down American AI broadly. While they love to accuse everyone else of being traitors, the Export Controls Deep State makes Americans poorer and the American military, to the extent they use AI, weaker. Most of the time, the best you can do is ignore them. They really are unaccountable and the personal retribution isn’t worth the cost. But now, they are leading a coup against the AI industry’s most indispensable man based on lies and tabloid gossip. Everyone should understand that the Export Controls Deep State has never provided any evidence for their claims nor any reason for their word to be trusted.