Forensic report: 6 Chinese AI models, incl. DeepSeek V4 and Kimi K3, carry fingerprints of export-banned Nvidia Blackwell chips

Zealousideal_Pin3444 · reddit · 2026-11-13

A forensic analysis by Will DePue at Unemployment Labs finds that 6 models released since April 2026 by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group (incl. DeepSeek-V4-Flash and Kimi K3) show numerical patterns matching Nvidia's export-controlled Blackwell GPUs, while earlier models from the same labs match Hopper.

• Evidence comes entirely from published weights: the team recovers initial values and searches for hardware configurations that reproduce them; matches were also verified on physical Blackwell chips for two models
• The authors caution this supports but doesn't prove smuggling, since Blackwell can be rented outside China; restricted AMD configs were excluded as alternatives
• The takeaway: releasing open weights also means publishing your hardware receipts

Related event: OpenAI researcher claims weight forensics show top Chinese labs trained models on banned Blackwell chips(36 posts)→

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