Will DePue Reports Blackwell Signatures in Six Chinese AI Models

Former OpenAI researcher Will DePue says his forensic analysis found Nvidia Blackwell initialization patterns in six Chinese AI models released since April 2026, including models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, and Ant Group. He says senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic checked his method, which identifies hardware generations through statistical traces in model weights. The findings indicate that the models had access to Blackwell GPUs, but do not show where the GPUs were or who owned them. The Decoder reports that Chinese companies can rent computing capacity at data centers outside China, so the analysis does not by itself establish physical smuggling or a violation of US export law. The report says the only other technical explanation would be an AMD MI300X, also restricted, artificially throttled to produce the same pattern.

Generated by AI from reports · Updated 15 hours ago