Research finds signs of Blackwell training in Chinese open-weight AI models

A research effort led by former OpenAI researcher Will DePue claims to have found evidence that prominent Chinese AI models were trained using Nvidia Blackwell chips restricted from export to China, TechCrunch reports. DePue, who leads nonprofit Unemployment Labs, examined openly released model weights for traces of the hardware configurations used during training. The findings include Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 releases and DeepSeek's V4 models. They do not establish that the models were trained entirely on Nvidia hardware or that export laws were violated: Chinese firms could have accessed chips in offshore data centers. The distinction exposes the gap between restrictions on chip shipments and restrictions on who uses the resulting computing capacity.