US data brokers are selling half a billion dollars in RL training environments to Chinese AI labs

A ChinaTalk investigation found that at least nine US data firms, including Mercor, Surge AI, AfterQuery and Turing, are selling roughly $500 million worth of training data, some in the form of reinforcement learning environments, to Chinese AI labs. Chinese labs reportedly buy the same products previously sold to Anthropic or OpenAI to skip costly in-house development, and combine them with distillation from US models to close the gap with less compute. The authors argue the Bureau of Industry and Security should apply existing export controls to dual-use environments such as coding and biology, while noting Chinese labs still trail US peers by at least a few months.