Chinese frontier AI models carry the fingerprint of export-controlled GPUs

A forensic analysis of published model weights finds that six models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group, released between April and November 2026, contain numerical patterns matching NVIDIA Blackwell chips (148-SM B200/B300 or 152-SM GB200/GB300), while earlier models from the same labs match Hopper. The authors recovered initialization seeds and thread layouts from preserved weights and confirmed the match on physical Blackwell hardware for DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3, estimating each training run used roughly 500 to 3,000 GPUs. The report says the evidence shows access to export-controlled hardware but does not establish where the chips were located, how access was obtained, or whether export controls were violated.