DeepSeek uses banned Nvidia chips for AI model, report says

Implying it’s *morally* wrong for a Chinese company to bypass US sanctions is hilarious. You really say that with a straight face when even the president admits this is only protectionism?

Open always beats closed. Drain the moats. Starve the ClosedAI beast.

Strictly speaking, it's not illegal for them to acquire it, it's illegal for an exporter in the US to sell (even if transitively) to them.

That the discussion has being hijacked and shifted to moral superiority is really unfortunate, because that was never the point in the first place.

All the labs permitting synthetic data do that.

Not sure why you would expect this, all the models started doing this as its much more cost effective to get data for post training don't you remember the first grok release where many times it started replies "as a model trained by openai..."

This is an absurd concept when it comes to international trade. Even intellectual property is mostly meaningless outside a state. Of course people will evade sanctions; what is the us going to do, invade singapore or malaysia?

This is just model distillation.

Anyone with the expertise to build a model from scratch (which DeepSeek certainly can) can do this in a careful manner.

> but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators.

Bingo.

I have no problem with pirates pirating other pirates.

Screw OpenAI and Anthropic closed source models built from public data. The law should be that weights trained from non-owned sources should be public domain, or that any copyright holder can sue them and demand model takedown.

Google and Meta are probably the only two AI companies that have a right to license massive amounts of training data from social media and user file uploads given that their ToSes grant them these rights. But even Meta is pirating stuff.

Even if OpenAI and Anthropic continue pirating training data and keeping the results closed, China's open source strategy will win out in the end. It erodes the crust of value that is carefully guarded by the American giants. Everyone else will be integrating open models and hacking them apart, splicing them in new ways.

LOL. Distillation doesn't count as plagiarism, or you should call Meta out on it. They're distilling the Chinese model.

Ref: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/inside-meta-s-piv...

but maybe i gave it a gracious reading.

So my 4090 (24 GB) is probably going to get turned into a 48/96 GB VRAM frankenstein in a Chinese chop shop. I haven't watched the full 3.5 hour documentary you linked but from the first few minutes, it seems quite interesting. And covers this exact thing.

Edit: Again, I checked the address, it was a house, not a freight forwarder warehouse. And if it was actually going to AU, the forwarder would be on the west coast in CA/WA, not east coast (had another order go to Thailand with a forwarder in SF. And Miami is the big hub for South America). For legit freight forwarding they also wouldn't have different names on the account & shipping address. As the parent comment's YT video describes, these are often just normal Chinese-Americans or international students who do this to make a bit of extra money.

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

[0]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/9/17/china-bans-tech-...

Many Americans, including their government, seem to think that US laws apply globally.

They have extradited Ukrainian men from Poland because that Ukrainian was running a torrent website (illegal in the US, not illegal in Ukraine nor Poland).

They tried getting an Australian extradited from Sweden and the UK for supposedly hosting a website that contained information the US government considered illegally obtained.

More egregiously, they have kidnapped tens to hundreds of people from various countries, sometimes on reasons as flimsy as watch model or name, to torture (sometimes to death), because a lawyer working for the president decided that's actually legal because they're waves hands "enemy combattants".

acting like china wouldn't doing the same thing to other country if they ever weld such position

every great power would do the same thing to defend their position, its not unique to the US. only because current incumbent power is we see things this way

But let's not pretend China doesn't use their influence to keep other countries down as well, and let's not pretend they allow a fair playing field for foreign competitors domestically either.

The US would not have imposed these targeted sanctions if China simply wanted to fairly compete in the marketplace.

US authorities are ok with Chinese companies accessing GPUs in overseas DCs because those DCs will still be subject any US export controls. Right now, we don’t really care if Chinese companies are building tier-2 LLMs on US gear. If China invades Taiwan or frontier models approach AGI, we will shut down those Malaysian and Thai data centers overnight.

What realistically could happen? Nvidia is already prohibited from selling their GPUs to China, I guess if you wanted it to really stop, you'd need to prohibit Nvidia from selling GPUs in any other country but the US, and require some sort of government controlled license to be able to buy it inside the US. Neither of which sound like realistic options.

So what could anyone really do, to "solve" this "problem"?

The Chinese government has done more for less so I wouldn't be so certain.

Shortly thereafter people realized they were probably just evading sanctions and ~stealing~ bootstrapping parameters from other models to reach their stated training cost. This report is just further reporting on that rumor.

Unlike your typical free market fanboy, the Chinese leadership isn't stupid. They were always planning to do that, sanctions or no.

Realistically, all sanctions can do is mess with their timelines for some temporary strategic advantage, slowing some things down and forcing reallocation of investment away from other areas into the sanctioned areas.

The US refraining from sanctions is likely the stupid move, because that lever of control will expire at some point. To not use it is to squander it.

But if there's one thing the US government and its business elite is good at, it's squandering things.

and forcing them to allow opium to be sold in their country

and forcing them to give up major port cities and open up trade against their wishes

Honestly whenever China gets around to getting its served-extremely-cold revenge for all the savagery committed against it in the 19th and 20th centuries, some chips are going to be the least of everyone's problems.

And American cigarettes were popular in Canada in the 90’s and 00’s. IIRC the Turkish tobacco blended in was banned by the Canadian state dept so theirs were garbage. Meanwhile Americans were flying into Canada in order to fly to Cuba.

Presumably everything youre describing could be averted by simply air gapping the hardware? Or tightly controlling how data gets into and out of the system where the chips are used?

You give the tech too much credit.

Eventually China will make their own shovels to dig up the gold. I'm not sure what this would do to Nvidia, but I'm sure we will find out.