In this case, there's relatively little ground for misunderstanding or exaggeration. There's either a malicious chip or there's not. I suppose in the "worst case" scenario, there could be a malicious chip, but some other government than the Chinese put it there.

However, reading the statement from the Chinese government in response to this story, which never actually denies the incident and instead complains about being victim to such hardware hacking themselves, that's not the impression I get: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...