Nvidia VP says letter demanding Jensen Huang's return is 'obviously fake'

What's going on

Nvidia, the most important maker of AI chips, already lost its founder Jensen Huang to a resignation. Now it has another problem. A supposed open letter from Nvidia executives and employees is circulating online, mostly on X. It urges the board to reinstate Huang as CEO. One of the listed signatories is Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning research and one of the company's best-known AI researchers.

Catanzaro pushed back on X on November 13, 2026, one day after Huang's resignation took effect, according to ITHome, Crypto Briefing and Wccftech. He wrote:

A fabricated letter is circulating online that calls on the Nvidia board to reinstate Jensen and claims I was involved. This letter is obviously fake, and even if it were real, I would not sign it.

He said he was "deeply saddened" that Huang is no longer at Nvidia, but that he fully supports the board and trusts its decisions. He also backed interim CEO Colette Kress, saying he has worked with her for years, knows her as an "exceptional leader", and that she has his full support.

How to spot the fake

Catanzaro's denial wasn't the only thing that gave the letter away. According to ITHome, it is a near-verbatim copy of the open letter OpenAI employees used in November 2023 to demand Sam Altman's return. Back then, OpenAI's board fired Altman out of nowhere, almost the entire staff threatened to quit, and Altman was back within days. ITHome says the fake Nvidia letter only swaps in new names: Nvidia for OpenAI, Jensen Huang for Sam Altman, and Colette Kress in place of OpenAI's interim chief at the time. Software developer Daniel Zhang was among those who pointed out the similarity, Wccftech reports.

There are other red flags too. ITHome says the list of signatories includes people who have already left Nvidia or whose job titles are wrong. According to Wccftech, it also names top executives such as Ian Buck, president of the accelerated computing business, and chief scientist Bill Dally. The letter even threatens a mass move to SpaceX. In the OpenAI original, the threatened destination was Microsoft. The sources don't say whether Buck or Dally have also distanced themselves from the letter.

Background: Huang's resignation

The letter lands in the middle of the biggest crisis in the company's history. Huang, 63, co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and has run it ever since. According to Wired, he admitted in an email to staff on Sunday that he had been "unfaithful" to his wife and that there was "no excuse" for it. That followed reports of an affair with an alleged Chinese intelligence source. On Thursday, the board announced Huang's resignation after reports of a second affair, this one with a direct report. Wired says Reuters then reported another alleged affair with a different employee. Huang hasn't commented publicly since his email.

Wired describes the fallout as massive. Nvidia has lost around one trillion dollars in market value since the allegations surfaced. US lawmakers and the FBI are investigating, and new export restrictions on chips are on the table. CFO Colette Kress, who has been with the company for 13 years and is familiar to investors from earnings calls, is serving as interim CEO. The new board chair is Harvey Jones, former CEO of chip design software maker Synopsys. According to Wired, the board consists mostly of early investors and long-time Huang confidants.

The real support for Huang

The fake aside, the former CEO does have genuine backing. Wired reviewed internal communications. Before the resignation, a long-time engineer wrote a post in the internal "suggestion box". It asked the board to gauge employee sentiment before making a decision and to publish the findings of the investigation. The post now has more than 1,600 comments, many of them calling for Huang's return. One reads:

If you believe in the mission, bring back THE boss.

One employee even sent a company-wide email demanding transparency about Huang's departure. Wired says around two dozen employees voiced support for Huang on LinkedIn, and it found no posts welcoming the resignation. In polls on Blind, an anonymous job platform for tech workers, 88 percent of participating Nvidia staff wanted to keep Huang as CEO, according to Crypto Briefing. Those polls were taken before all the details of the scandal came out, though. Nvidia has around 42,000 employees worldwide.

Outside the company, ITHome reports an online petition called "Stand with Jensen", titled "Thirty-three years deserve an answer". It already has more than 84,000 signatures. Well-known figures from the open-source AI scene have also come out in support of Huang, according to Wccftech, including Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face co-founder Clément Delangue.

Analysis

This fake is more than a curiosity. A forged employee letter is designed to make it look like the workforce is in revolt. Boards, investors and business partners watch for exactly that kind of signal, especially at a company half the AI industry depends on. Catanzaro's quick public denial takes away much of the document's impact. As Crypto Briefing notes, he draws a clear line between personal sympathy for Huang and calls to reverse the board's decision.

We don't know who wrote the letter or why. It's also unclear whether other executives named in it will issue denials. Don't push the comparison with OpenAI in 2023 too far, though. Altman was fired without any apparent scandal and brought back by his staff. Huang resigned after admitting wrongdoing himself, and the allegations touch on national security. What matters for Nvidia now is whether the interim leadership can reassure investors and customers, and how employee sentiment shifts once all the allegations are out. It also remains to be seen whether the crisis leads to new export rules for AI chips.