> Rubio and Bessent or their teams.

Just widening the suspect list a bit, per WSJ reporting, the two opposing factions are:

China AI Hawks: State (Rubio), Defense (Hegseth), Treasury (Bessent) Depts

vs

China AI Trade Pragmatists: Commerce Dept (Lutnick), White House trading desks, advisors and AI industry.

Jensen was the wildcard who'd been effective in reaching Trump and swaying him at the last minute multiple times. Back in May Rubio attempted to neuter Jensen's influence by briefing Trump on the intelligence that Jensen was banging a suspected Chinese asset, but Trump shrugged it off and kept Jensen involved.

The timing of the leak of this old info to publicly damage Jensen was likely the U.S. / China summit coming up in Shenzen on the 18th and 19th. That's where the current B200 chip export waiver extension will be either re-negotiated or not negotiated (the waiver expires in January). The Hawks want to let the waiver expire and are unwilling to negotiate it no matter what's offered. The Pragmatists want to offer a B200 waiver extension in exchange for high-value goals like rare earths, Iran and/or trade concessions. This has been an escalating battle inside the administration for well over a year. Also: this isn't a clear red / blue issue. There are congress members of both parties on each side. Leaking the Alice story to the media to take Jensen out was crossing a pretty big line. Ultimately, I think the root cause was Trump's constant waffling leaving a major foreign policy issue unresolved for over a year causing the factions to continue arguing and escalating. Lutnick was on the losing side and, per the WSJ yesterday, now "fighting to keep his job" because the Commerce Dept has been refusing to add Megaspeed to the blocked Entities List for over a year (which they could do at any time with no justification required). That means the U.S. government allowed NVidia to keep selling cards to Megaspeed and Megaspeed affiliates on purpose.

> AI industry

Except for OpenAI and Anthropic...