Top Chinese Frontier AI Models Carry the Fingerprint of Export-Controlled NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs

A forensic analysis of published model weights found that six AI models released since April 2026 by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group carry numerical fingerprints matching NVIDIA’s export-restricted Blackwell GPUs, while earlier models from the same labs match the older Hopper generation. The findings supply the first technical evidence for earlier U.S. official and press allegations that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI had obtained Blackwell chips, which require a U.S. export license that has not been reported for any of the models. The method recovers traces of each model’s initial values and searches for the hardware and initial configurations that reproduce them, ruling out export-restricted AMD hardware for DeepSeek-V4-Flash and calling it very unlikely for the other five. Watch for further model releases from these labs and for U.S. officials to cite the weight-based evidence as scrutiny of Blackwell access intensifies.