Chinese AI models show traces of export-restricted Blackwell GPUs

New models from Chinese AI developers carry traces of NVIDIA's Blackwell GPUs, the chips the US restricts from export to China. According to the report, a published forensic analysis found numerical patterns matching Blackwell hardware in six models released by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group since April. Earlier models from the same companies match NVIDIA's previous-generation Hopper chips instead.

The striking part is where the evidence comes from: entirely the models' own public weights. The team recovers traces of the models' initial values and then searches for the hardware and starting configurations that reproduce them. According to the article, the match was also confirmed on physical Blackwell chips for DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3.

The researchers are explicit that their findings do not establish where the chips were located, how access was obtained, or whether export controls were violated. In other words, there is a technical trace of access to the hardware, but not yet an explanation of how it happened. The only alternative they identify is specially configured AMD hardware; they ruled it out for DeepSeek-V4-Flash and consider it very unlikely for the other five models.

Why does it matter? Chip export restrictions sit at the centre of US efforts to slow China's leading AI labs. According to the report, US officials and press had already alleged that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI were using Blackwell chips, but without publishing technical evidence. The new analysis offers the first concrete technical support for those claims. Still, the GPU-count estimates rest on assumptions about efficiency and run length that no lab has disclosed, and the authors say they are not confident in those figures.