Piggybacking to the Frontier

American data vendors including Mercor, Surge AI, Turing, AfterQuery, Pareto, Abundant, DeccanAI, Eaglepoint and Invisible sell reinforcement learning environments and other data to Chinese AI labs, with AfterQuery reportedly drawing half of its $100 million ARR from Chinese business. The article explains how RL environments work, argues the sales let Chinese labs save compute and piggyback on American post-training recipes, and proposes BIS export restrictions and DoW procurement rules while noting the harms are likely limited.