Former OpenAI researcher says he found Nvidia Blackwell fingerprints hidden inside six Chinese AI models

Will DePue says weight-initialization patterns in six Chinese models released since April 2026 match Nvidia's Blackwell core counts (148 or 152), while earlier models like DeepSeek-V3 and Kimi K2.5 show Hopper signatures; he says OpenAI and Anthropic researchers independently confirmed the findings and has published verification code on GitHub. He maps DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiniMax-M3 to B200/B300 chips and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, Kimi K3.1-Pro and Ant Group's Ling-3.1-flash to GB200/GB300, estimating the five training runs used about 12,000 Blackwell GPUs costing over half a billion dollars. The report notes the fingerprint shows only which hardware initialized the weights and does not by itself prove smuggling or a violation of US export law, since capacity can be rented outside China.