NuAxiSemiconductor trade intelligence

Chinese AI labs are training models on Nvidia's Blackwell despite export controls, says ex-OpenAI engineer

What happened

According to a report published Friday, 13 Nov 2026 by Will DePue, a former OpenAI engineer who left the company earlier this year to launch AI research consultancy Unemployment Labs, US export controls are not stopping AI labs in China from using restricted Nvidia chips. His forensic report, 'Top Chinese Frontier AI Models Carry the Fingerprint of Export-Controlled Nvidia Blackwell GPUs,' claims 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. By analyzing hidden signatures left in published model weights by GPU-dependent weight initialization (via the Philox PRNG and Nvidia's cuRAND library), he searched more than six trillion combinations of chip layout and seed number and says he found conclusive evidence that six Chinese AI models – including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3 and MiniMax-M3 – were initialized on Nvidia Blackwell systems, four of which match Grace Blackwell, the GB200 and GB300 parts in Nvidia's flagship liquid-cooled rack-scale systems; the report includes initial seed values linking DeepSeek-V3 to Nvidia's Hopper and DeepSeek-V4-Flash to Blackwell, and DePue claims multiple senior researchers, both independent and inside frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, have confirmed the result. This is the first time MiniMax and Ant Group have been publicly linked to usage of Nvidia's Blackwell. DePue cited limitations: usage of Blackwell GPUs doesn't prove where the GPUs were located, so some Chinese labs may have used this hardware through US providers – a loophole the Cloud Security Act aims to close. Background: a few weeks ago, Israel-based security company Lava said it had found 32 Nvidia B300 GPUs, part of Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra generation, through publicly exposed monitoring endpoints with IP addresses geolocated to China, and these GPUs are subject to US export controls. At least four bills await consideration that aim to limit China's access to leading edge AI tech: the AI Overwatch Act, the Chip Security Act, the Match Act and the Cloud Security Act; on Monday, US Senators Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) cited Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's 'relationship with a suspected Chinese spy' as justification for passing the AI Overwatch Act, which would codify the Trump administration's existing chip export controls, while the Trump administration said Thursday it's not sure whether Alice Huang was a spy – an allegation denied by Beijing and under FBI investigation. Huang's resignation as Nvidia CEO followed revelations of an affair with Chinese businesswoman Alice Huang, who founded Singapore-based Megaspeed International in 2023, reportedly under investigation by US authorities for allegedly smuggling Nvidia chips to China. The source does not state any price impact.