A senior Trump administration official said on Monday that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek trained its latest AI model on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell. The official indicated the model could be released as soon as next week, and raised the prospect that DeepSeek’s access to Blackwells may violate U.S. export controls.
According to the official, U.S. investigators believe DeepSeek would try to remove or obscure the technical signatures that could reveal the use of American-made AI processors. The official declined to disclose how the U.S. government came into possession of that information. Nvidia declined to comment on the matter.
The Chinese embassy in Washington issued a statement asserting that Beijing opposes efforts to draw ideological lines, expanding the scope of national security, or politicizing economic, trade, and technology issues. The Commerce Department and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to requests for comment, the official said.
The official did not provide details on how DeepSeek obtained the Blackwell chips, but underscored current U.S. policy: "we're not shipping Blackwells to China." That policy position formed the basis for the official's observation that DeepSeek’s possession of the chips could constitute a breach of U.S. export rules.
This previously unreported information arrives at a sensitive juncture for policymakers in Washington who remain divided over how tightly to restrict Chinese access to cutting-edge American AI semiconductors. Some U.S. lawmakers and advisers, often described as China hawks, worry that advanced chips can be diverted from commercial applications to military uses, potentially accelerating China’s capabilities and challenging U.S. leadership in AI.
By contrast, figures such as the White House AI Czar David Sacks and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang have argued in favor of allowing some advanced chips to be shipped to China. They contend that making high-end processors available can discourage Chinese firms, including Huawei, from stepping up efforts to catch up with the technology developed by Nvidia and AMD.
U.S. export controls currently prohibit Blackwell shipments to China. In August, President Donald Trump signaled a willingness to permit the sale of a scaled-down version of the Blackwell to Chinese customers. He later modified that stance, suggesting the most advanced chips should be reserved for use by U.S. companies and withheld from China.
In December, the administration decided to allow Chinese firms to purchase Nvidia's second-most advanced chips, known as the H200. That December decision drew criticism from those advocating tighter controls, and shipments of H200 units have remained stalled while guardrails associated with the approvals are put in place. The U.S. official declined to comment on whether the new information about DeepSeek's Blackwells would influence the administration's prior decision on whether to permit DeepSeek to acquire H200s.
The official also said the Blackwell units in DeepSeek's possession are likely configured as part of a cluster housed at a DeepSeek data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. The official added that the model the chips helped train appears to have relied on the technique known as distillation, using evaluations from established U.S. models to improve the newer model's outputs.
The official named several leading-edge U.S. AI firms whose models the DeepSeek model likely distilled from, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. The description echoed allegations previously made by OpenAI and Anthropic, according to the official. Distillation, as described by the official, entails having an older, more capable model assess the answers of a newer model in order to transfer knowledge from the older model to the newer one.
Hangzhou-based DeepSeek first drew investor and market attention early last year when it unveiled a set of AI models that rivals described as comparable to some top U.S. offerings. That development prompted concern among U.S. officials that China might narrow the gap in AI capabilities despite limitations imposed by export controls.
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