Our forensic analysis of publicly released AI models finds evidence that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group have gained access to NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs, despite restrictions on exporting these chips to China, and are using that hardware to create their AI models.
I thought this would be nonsense at first, but the methodology is interesting. It seems plausible. And they tested quite a good spread of open weights, like MiMo and LongCat (which usually fly under the radar), all the way back to Yi 34B.
They missed Russia’s LLM, but that’s okay; it’s very obscure.
It’s also “lucky” they found this correlation, and so many recent weights happened to be initialized with PyTorch, on the GPU: very specific conditions.
…Also, I think the FP4 precision is a dead giveaway too, as Hopper wouldn’t be able to train that effectively, right? I assumed they were using at least some smuggled B200s.
And the export restrictions were stupid anyway.