US data firms sell about $500 million in AI training environments to Chinese labs
A ChinaTalk investigation reports that US data vendors including Mercor, Surge AI and AfterQuery are selling roughly half a billion dollars of AI training data to Chinese labs, including RL environments built earlier for OpenAI or Anthropic. At least nine firms are involved and export controls barely apply.
Why it matters
This exposes a gap in US export controls that could let Chinese labs benefit from techniques developed for US frontier models.
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