This month, Jensen Huang resigned as CEO of Nvidia after acknowledging an affair with a woman U.S. intelligence officials suspect is a Chinese intelligence asset. Nvidia’s board said it had “no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised,” and China has denied the allegations.
A month earlier, OpenAI’s countermeasures team found a listening device in a San Francisco conference room where executives often held sensitive discussions. The FBI later arrested an OpenAI employee accused of planting it.
To most people, espionage belongs in spy thrillers. For C-suite executives, corporate espionage and executive targeting are a growing threat. Companies once seen as untouchable now face foreign espionage and physical targeting.
The problem isn’t awareness or money. Today’s executives have to change how they live, travel, and interact with the people around them to prepare for adversaries.
Big tech companies already spend millions on executive security. Nvidia, No. 16 on the 2026 Fortune 500, spent nearly $4 million protecting Huang in fiscal 2026, according to Fortune‘s analysis of company filings, up from $3.5 million in 2024.
The December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk reminded S&P 500 companies that security reaches well beyond cybersecurity. Since then, spending has climbed. About 38% of S&P 500 companies provided security perks to at least some executives in 2025, up from 28% in 2023, according to an early look at proxy filings by executive data firm Equilar.
AI companies are a growing target for competitors and foreign governments, said Michael Evanoff, global chief security officer at physical security company Verkada and a former U.S. assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security.
“It is also especially vulnerable because it is an emerging industry and has not yet built the security muscle memory of other consequential, DOD-aligned industries like aerospace, defense and critical infrastructure,” Evanoff said.
That puts the burden on executives themselves. They need better training to recognize the signs that they are being targeted.
Predictability is the biggest vulnerability
“Predictability is the highest vulnerability for executives,” Evanoff said. Many high-powered leaders are disciplined about their routines, and that discipline makes them easier targets.
CEOs who avoid patterns are harder for adversaries to track. Varying routines matters even more at home, because many adversaries consider a residence an easier target than a corporate office.
Once a CEO’s schedule is set, the security team vets it: who is hosting each event, what each meeting will involve, and whether any new or escalating complaints against the CEO or the company raise red flags.
Protecting information matters as much as protecting the person. International travel now calls for a counterintelligence brief, and before boarding, executives need to know what they can and can’t disclose.
When an executive visits a country with a history of corporate espionage, Evanoff recommends traveling with loaner laptops and phones that carry no personal or proprietary information.
“Protective intelligence and due diligence are a must-have, not a nice-to-have, for today’s C-suite executives,” Evanoff said.
AI has made deepfakes a physical security problem
AI-driven cyberattacks are becoming more common, but generative AI is also turning into a physical security concern. With free tools, adversaries can now target companies and their top executives with deepfakes and synthetic clones.
“Synthetic voice clones can be built from seconds of public audio, such as earnings calls, interviews or social clips,” Evanoff said. “Live-call video deepfakes are now convincing enough that people identify them correctly only about half the time in controlled settings.”
That means employees may not be able to trust what they see or hear, including their own CEO on a video call. Boards, as Fortune has reported, aren’t ready for a deepfaked CEO.
How companies can spot red flags early
Evanoff pushes companies with national security implications to use layered screening in hiring: a background check, social and financial due diligence, a social media review, and sometimes a polygraph.
The right response to a vulnerability depends on the business, Evanoff said. But companies should flag when an employee’s lifestyle changes in ways that could open them to coercion.
“Prudent companies should conduct periodic check-ins after hiring, including financial screening and auditing of publicly available social media activity,” Evanoff said.
Former intelligence officers say the same scrutiny has to reach the top. As one former FBI counterintelligence operative told Fortune, the easiest way into a company may be getting close to its CEO.
Building a security-minded company starts with how future executives are trained. Evanoff has found that most business schools don’t discuss security or the chief security officer role; one of the few he has seen address it is Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
He urges companies to treat executive protection as a requirement: modern physical security, insider-threat and workplace-violence programs, due diligence, and a security operations center to receive and process intelligence.
“Drivers, residential security and travel advances remain essential, but close coordination among physical security, cybersecurity, legal and communications is now paramount,” Evanoff said.