#DeepSeek

Lawyer upgrades eight-V100 private AI server to run 80% of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash

A lawyer running a private AI server on eight used Nvidia V100 GPUs moved about 80% of its work from 2-bit to 4-bit NVFP4 precision, adding 1TB of RAM and an RTX 3090. The server runs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash with a legal harness for his law practice, and code output dropped from 160–215 to 150–180 tokens per second, though the crashes that hit the new build are gone. The crashes, originally blamed on PCIe, were likely caused by a bad PSU.

Export-banned Nvidia chips are behind China’s most powerful AI models — uh-oh, Jensen!

Unemployment Labs researcher Will DePue analyzed the weights of openly released models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group and found evidence that models including Moonshot's Kimi K3 releases and DeepSeek's V4 bear fingerprints of training on export-banned Blackwell chips. Epoch AI estimates about two million advanced chips entered China in 2024 and 2025 through schemes hiding their final destination, though the chips could have been in offshore data centers such as those in Malaysia, which imported an estimated 275,000 Nvidia AI accelerators in that period. The article also reports that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang left the company this week after admitting an affair with Alice Huang, an executive of Megaspeed, a company implicated in smuggling Nvidia chips into China.

Former OpenAI researcher says he found Nvidia Blackwell fingerprints hidden inside six Chinese AI models

Will DePue says weight-initialization patterns in six Chinese models released since April 2026 match Nvidia's Blackwell core counts (148 or 152), while earlier models like DeepSeek-V3 and Kimi K2.5 show Hopper signatures; he says OpenAI and Anthropic researchers independently confirmed the findings and has published verification code on GitHub. He maps DeepSeek-V4-Flash and MiniMax-M3 to B200/B300 chips and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, Kimi K3.1-Pro and Ant Group's Ling-3.1-flash to GB200/GB300, estimating the five training runs used about 12,000 Blackwell GPUs costing over half a billion dollars. The report notes the fingerprint shows only which hardware initialized the weights and does not by itself prove smuggling or a violation of US export law, since capacity can be rented outside China.

Featured coverage of this story: 《Chinese frontier AI models carry the fingerprint of export-controlled GPUs》

Kazakhstan-linked hackers used AI agent to spy on Central Asian governments

CloudSEK found an exposed server belonging to the hacking group Silent Lynx containing over a dozen gigabytes of stolen government documents, hacking tools and records showing an operator used the open-source Hermes AI agent, built mainly on DeepSeek models, for reconnaissance, data collection and erasing traces. The group maintained extensive access to Tajikistan's national railway network from at least mid-August to early October and used a single employee's credentials to reach Tajikistan's national electronic document management platform, also compromising a server supporting Uzbekistan's Smart Forestry initiative. CloudSEK assessed with medium confidence that Silent Lynx is tied to Kazakhstan based on Russian-language communications and test connections from a Kazakh residential internet provider, without establishing any link to the Kazakh government.

Phala Confidential AI Compromised

Phala published preliminary findings on a security incident in which an attacker chained a legacy internet-facing service with management interfaces that trusted loopback access, creating unauthorized CVMs and obtaining application credentials, and also took control of an inference VM serving DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731, exposing in-flight request data. Requests routed to Phala by OpenRouter between October 21, 2026 00:00 UTC and November 8, 2026 05:35 UTC should be treated as exposed, and affected CVM owners were contacted directly with rotation guidance. Phala contained the incident on November 8, rotated its KMS root key on November 6, restored the model service with added protections, and says a full root cause analysis is still in progress.

Lawyer builds private AI server with eight used Nvidia V100 GPUs

A lawyer on Reddit described a private AI server built from eight used 2018-era Nvidia Tesla V100 data center GPUs so case files never leave the office. The build uses two 4-card SXM2 NVLink boards, four PEX switches and SlimSAS cables, and had one burnt power connector; it now runs the open DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model with every expert in GPU memory at up to 215 tokens per second. The four-GPU boards cost about $2,400 apiece when purchased.

AI agents stole 190k gaming credentials for under $400 in model costs

Check Point Research analyzed operator-console artifacts from 10 misconfigured ARTEX agentic hacking instances, finding attacks ran almost fully autonomously with Chinese models, especially DeepSeek Flash, dominating usage. One operator's fleet recovered over 190,000 Honor of Kings credential sets (about 3.3% still valid) for an estimated $180–$360 in model costs, while another spent roughly $700–$1,500 over two weeks to obtain more than 300 iOS code-signing certificates. Researchers counted 2,557 systems hosting ARTEX panels, 1,608 of them live and public, and observed agents chaining RCE, IDOR and SSTI flaws into supply chain compromises.

[AINews] Behind Latent Space: Kill My SaaS, Jev & AI in 2026 | AIEi Shanghai

This AI News roundup covers the dispute over the "Weight Space Programming" story, noting that some claims were presented too favorably but that the results have been independently replicated, alongside an AI Engineer Shanghai feature and an interview on the history of Latent Space. It also recaps model releases and evals, including Tencent Hy4, Sarvam Prism, Kimi K3.1 Pro and LongCat-2.5, plus Anthropic's open-sourced FlashProve provable-inference system and benchmark audits from Prime Intellect and Xeophon.

“Black October” for AI Developer Platforms

At least nine AI developer platforms disclosed incidents during October, with Fireworks, OpenCode and Warp reporting indications of an “agent swarm” attack and OpenCode and CommandCode attributing theirs to attempted “distillation.” Wiz describes downstream abuse of enterprise credentials tied to one vendor breach, including two keys used for roughly 800k and 1.7 million Bedrock calls respectively, likely over $100k in usage at list price. Wiz also links the keys to resale operations at llm-routing.com and xingjiabiapi.org, and publishes IOCs including 23.106.46.239 and 38.246.114.118.

OpenAI's Astra becomes the main target for Chinese AI labs after Anthropic tightens its defenses

Chinese AI labs are now mainly using OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra rather than Anthropic's Claude for distillation, with The Information reporting that DeepSeek and Moonshot AI leaned heavily on Astra's outputs to train models including Kimi K3.1 Pro and V4.1-Flash 1017. Such distillation requires labs to get models to reveal hidden reasoning steps, which both OpenAI and Anthropic ban. Anthropic says its new defenses cut the data attackers can pull by 90 to 99 percent, and OpenAI in late September reported a coordinated distillation campaign it says involved people linked to Moonshot.

[AINews] Anthropic files for $2T IPO in 2 weeks: 1400% growth rate, 48% of revenue through cloud partners, 85% margin, $1B op profit in Q2, $134B cash in bank and $10B lifetime burn

Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 to list on Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT," reporting revenue growth from $41M in 2023 to $16.3B in H1 2026, with Q2 revenue of $11.6B (up 1,368% YoY) and Q2 operating profit of $974M. The filing shows an 85% gross margin in H1 2026, 48% of H1 2026 revenue flowing through cloud marketplaces, $112.4B in cash plus $19.3B in short-term investments against roughly $9.7B in implied lifetime burn, and non-cancelable compute commitments extending into the next decade. It also discloses a recent delay in pre-training a new frontier model and describes "Virtual Collaborators" as the forward pitch for over a billion knowledge workers by 2028.

OpenAI offers discounts up to 90 percent to poach Anthropic's biggest customers

OpenAI is reportedly winning major Anthropic customers with aggressive discounts, including Rippling, Replit and DataCamp; Rippling CEO Parker Conrad said OpenAI's share of its coding workload rose from 16 to 52 percent while Anthropic's fell from 57 to 18 percent. Replit switched after OpenAI offered more than 30 percent off a contract worth over $100 million a year, and DataCamp CEO Jonathan Cornelissen said OpenAI's pricing cut his costs by 80 to 90 percent. The Information reports Anthropic's growth slowed from Q2 to Q3, and both companies face price pressure from Chinese models such as Deepseek and Kimi.

DeepSeek reportedly raises $15B days after US restrictions

Bloomberg reported that Chinese AI lab DeepSeek raised about $15 billion (roughly 100 billion yuan), one of the country's largest funding rounds, just two days after the U.S. ordered federal civilian agencies to remove its AI technology over security concerns. Potential investors include CATL and Tencent, following DeepSeek's June round of more than $7 billion at a $50 billion valuation and a reported July effort to raise an additional $1.5 billion at around a $71 billion valuation, with plans for a potential IPO in China as early as next year. DeepSeek, founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, is ramping up spending on AI infrastructure and open models for domestic and international markets despite U.S. restrictions.

[AINews] not much happened today

DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash 1017, a 552B-total/16B-active MoE model with a 1M-token context and MIT license, scoring 45 on the AA Intelligence Index and ranking as the top open-weight model in Code Arena WebDev and Agent Arena. MiniMax announced M3.1 Flash at $0.15/$0.60 per million input/output tokens with weights due Oct 23, and Inception released Mercury 3, which it calls its most capable diffusion LLM at 1,000+ tok/s. The roundup also covers Meta's Muse Wonder Full and Muse Glimmer report, FLUX 3 Max, vLLM v0.32.0, Google's Harness² self-improving agent framework, and Anthropic's Public Benefit Fund committing roughly 20% of equity to the public good.