A multinational American company

With the majority of sales outside the U.S. Are you arguing for Intel to employ some sort of "American exceptionalism" type policy when notifying customers of weaknesses? Apart from being a discriminatory position in itself, it is also not a very sound business decision.

Also, with all we know about the NSA, I'll be very surprised if the U.S. government didn't already knew and if they did, didn't try to take advantage of it.

Yes, it's headquartered in USA, all the executives are personally liable to USA laws (and not Chinese laws), and it actually is quite possible that they could be required to pursue American exceptionalism in regards to security issues, even if they weren't doing so yesterday.

I.e. an order (with due legal process) by USA government to not disclose that vulnerability to any Chinese companies would be possible and binding, but not the other way around. That's what being a USA company means, no matter where your sales are.

Any country where Intel sales CPUs could require by national law Intel, AMD etc to notify its government of vulnerabilities, no later than other governments.

If Intel explicitly does some kind of US exceptionalism explicitly, the EU, China and other governments will probably require to be aware of the vulnerabilities no later than other governments.

How could the EU possibly let Intel sell CPUs, and let Intel inform other governments of vulnerabilities first? So that the other governments have a time window to play with the vulnerability against the EU?

> an order (with due legal process) by USA government to not disclose that vulnerability to any Chinese companies would be possible and binding

In that case, sure, but I was talking about a voluntary disclosure, which is the case here.