Editor’s note: Luminar Technologies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and was delisted from Nasdaq. Its lidar business assets, including the Iris and Halo product lines, were subsequently acquired by MicroVision (NASDAQ:MVIS) in a bankruptcy auction. Original article references to Luminar (LAZR) as an independent non-Chinese lidar alternative below were incorrect and have been updated to reflect these details. Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections. Duke University professor Miroslav Pajic recently demonstrated how brittle the sensors underneath America’s self-driving fleet are. In one attack, malware embedded in a lidar unit conjured a person in the sensor’s point cloud who was not physically present. In a second, a real physical obstacle was made to vanish entirely from the sensor output. Pajic told CNBC it is “easy to physically spoof lidar,” warning that malware inserted at the factory or via firmware updates can stay dormant until triggered, and that automakers usually cannot audit a lidar maker’s proprietary source code. The company at the center of that risk is Hesai Group (NASDAQ:HSAI), a Shanghai-based lidar maker that commands roughly one-third of worldwide automotive lidar sales. The Pentagon blacklisted Hesai as a Chinese military entity in 2024, a designation that prohibits Pentagon contracts but does not ban commercial sales to US autonomous platforms. Hesai sensors are already inside Amazon’s Zoox robotaxis, trucking firms Waabi and Kodiak, AV company Nuro, and Agtonomy, and they monitor passenger and traffic flow at New York’s JFK Airport security checkpoints. NVIDIA Doubles Down NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) selected Hesai as a lidar option for DRIVE Hyperion 10, its reference architecture for Level 4 autonomy, at CES in January 2026. In March, Hesai joined the Nvidia Halos AI Systems Inspection Lab, the first ANSI-accredited inspection lab for AI-driven physical systems. Jensen Huang framed the ambition simply: “Our