WASHINGTON (Feb 24): Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek's latest artificial intelligence (AI) model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia's most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, a senior Trump administration official said on Monday, in what could represent a violation of US export controls. But China hawks fear chips could easily be diverted from commercial uses to help supercharge China's military and threaten US dominance in AI. "This shows why exporting any AI chips to China is so dangerous," said Chris McGuire, who served as a White House National Security Council official under former president Joe Biden. The technique known as distillation involves having an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluate the quality of the answers coming out of a newer model, effectively transferring the older model's learnings. The Information previously reported that DeepSeek had smuggled chips into China to train its next model.

Source: The Edge Markets February 24, 2026 06:55 UTC