Former OpenAI Engineer Claims Chinese AI Models Show Signs of Restricted Nvidia Blackwell Chips

A former OpenAI research engineer, Will DePue, published findings on November 12 claiming that six AI models from Chinese companies, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, show hardware fingerprints of NVIDIA's restricted Blackwell GPUs in their initial weights. DePue's organization, Unemployment Labs, analyzed model weight initialization patterns, which retain GPU architecture-specific features. They identified Blackwell B200/B300 in DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiniMax-M3, and Grace Blackwell GB200/GB300 in four other models, while older versions matched the previous Hopper architecture. The researcher reproduced results using actual B300 and GB200 chips, with independent confirmation from senior OpenAI and Anthropic researchers. However, DePue acknowledged the evidence cannot prove where training occurred or how chips were obtained, leaving questions about export control compliance unresolved.