Eric Neyman

Research Director, Citizens for Safe AI

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Good take

[Drew Savicki @DrewSav]

Past midterms weren't usually predictive because past presidents acted rationally after a midterm setback. Donald Trump is not capable of acting rationally.

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

This seems like a huge deal, and a big indictment of both Nvidia and the Trump Administration.

[will depue @willdepue]

I have a major result to share.

I’ve found conclusive forensic evidence that the top 4 Chinese AI labs—DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax and Ant Group—have built their newest models on NVIDIA’s most advanced Blackwell chips, which are barred from export to China.

This sounds insane, but I discovered that almost every AI model carries a hidden signature of the GPU that trained it. When a model is first set up, the starting values of its weights are laid out in a pattern that depends on the exact GPU. Each combination of GPU and seed number produces a unique pattern—a sort of fingerprint of the hardware used to create the model. Traces of that pattern survive training into the published model.

Again, this evidence isn’t based on any insider information or leaking. It’s based on a forensic analysis of the model weights released by the companies themselves.

I searched more than six trillion combinations of chip layout and seed number and matched them to open-weights models. In doing so, I found conclusive evidence that six Chinese AI models—including DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi K3, and MiniMax-M3—were initialized on NVIDIA Blackwell systems. Four of the models match Grace Blackwell, the GB200 and GB300 parts in NVIDIA’s flagship liquid-cooled rack-scale systems.

I then verified these results on real hardware. Running unmodified PyTorch with the seeds I’d recovered, a Blackwell B300 reproduced DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s untouched starting weights bit for bit, and a rented GB200 reproduced Kimi K3’s to a correlation of 0.999995. A Hopper H100 reproduced none of DeepSeek-V4-Flash’s, and changing the seed by one broke the match. (DeepSeek’s seed is 953049583 by the way.) The method also was verified to match 24 known open-weights models to the hardware that developers said they used.

It is exceedingly unlikely that these results are a coincidence. Across six trillion combinations, the best accidental match should reach only about 8 sigma (i.e., eight standard deviations above what random chance would produce). The real matches range from 49 to 1,385 sigma, and even the weakest single test hits 20.

These were data-center-scale training runs. With some analysis of release schedules and model details, I estimate that the largest, Kimi K3 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro, used 2,000 to 3,000 Blackwell GPUs each. Clusters of this size cost on the order of $150 to $200 million each to buy, and across these labs alone would add up to more than half a billion dollars of export-controlled GPUs, not counting experimental compute or otherwise. It’s quite likely that we see multi-billion dollar expenditure on export-controlled GPUs.

I am highly confident in this result, and it has been independently verified by senior researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic. You can read the full report at https://t.co/YOtzND0Jqk.

There is much more I’ve identified about these models through other forms of checkpoint forensics like this, and will have more to share soon.

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Ok this is pretty cool, great job @MichaelTrazzi!

[Susan Rice @AmbassadorRice]

Come join me and many others as we rally in DC on Saturday to STOP the AI RACE!

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Wow, this idea by OpenAI to create a bidding war for AGI between the United States and its adversaries is kind of insane.

[Garrison Lovely @GarrisonLovely]

The Jensen story, more than anything, is one of putting your own interests over literally everyone else's. It's very Silicon Valley and reminds me of this long-rumored story that @kevinroose finally reported out in The AGI Chronicles:

"That year, Amodei started pulling members of his team aside and telling them about all the objectionable things he’d seen. The worst, in his opinion, was a fundraising scheme that Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever had cooked up back in 2017, when Elon Musk was pulling away from OpenAI and they needed a new source of funding. Their idea, which became known as the “countries plan,” was to set up an auction between governments, including the United States, China, and Russia, for the rights to OpenAI’s future AGI technology, according to five people familiar with the plan."

These people have no allegiance to anyone but themselves and are trying to build god. Whether or not they can, we should stop them.

Kevin's book for how we got here: https://t.co/ilK4K09xib

And mine for how we win:
https://t.co/u7NIfKJu5g

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Interesting! But worth noting that the effect is still very substantial, even if reduced.

[Lakshya Jain @lxeagle17]

Made free-to-read because I think this is a really important piece. Our preliminary analysis of 2026 shows that while moderate politicians retained an electability edge, it seems to have *considerably* shrunk from the last few cycles, on the whole.

https://t.co/AO5iDszb6C

[FRONTRUNNER @frontrunnershow]

Net favorability among independents:

🟢 Jon Ossoff (D): +1
🟡 Josh Shapiro (D): -8
🟠 Brian Kemp (R): -12
🟠 AOC (D): -15
🟠 Marco Rubio (R): -16
🔴 Kamala Harris (D): -23
🔴 Gavin Newsom (D): -23
🔴 JD Vance (R): -28
🔴 Tucker Carlson (R): -32
⚫️ Donald Trump (R): -44

Reuters/Ipsos poll | 11/6-11/9

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Pretty embarrassing for Trump that his cabinet secretaries aren't obeying his orders. Maybe he should do something about that!

[Axios @axios]

SCOOP: President Trump authorized a crackdown on companies suspected of diverting Nvidia's advanced AI chips to China on Thursday, but one administration official repeatedly stood in the way: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. https://t.co/5Duzi14eEp

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

Rumors have swirled in SF for months that Jensen Huang is having an extramarital affair with a Huawei executive. This is certainly an update toward that...

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

remember

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

@_NathanCalvin lol you beat me to it

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

remember

[Trevor Levin @trevposts]

This plan is really, really bad. The companies have a moral duty to try much harder to remove themselves from any commercial race that would lead to the development of vastly superhuman AIs with these safety techniques, to inform the public about the risks being imposed on them, and to allow for unbiased assessment of the risks of this plan.

Instead, as far as I know, they are lobbying against the laws that would be our best shot at getting off this runaway train, obfuscating their own views on the risk levels, and at best allowing only a tiny number of external evaluators (who have their own biases) the information they need to assess the risks.

[The Economist @TheEconomist]

And his should not be the only head to roll https://t.co/YlbEBr2LjE

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

@shanekempton See here! https://t.co/5Jm14sAOrj

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

I will state things plainly: We are all in imminent danger.

Absent strong government regulation, it is very plausible that we will all be dead in two years.

[Do Not Accept @DONOTACCEPTai]

AI companies admit what they’re building might kill everyone. We don't have to agree to this.

Add your name at https://t.co/Pcg0clMbfV to say: we do not accept your terms.

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

(Just to clarify what I personally mean by "very plausible": maybe something in the 5% range -- although the probability of extremely bad outcomes that are not literal extinction is much higher.)

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

@drdoneickstedt See here: https://t.co/5Jm14sAOrj

[Daniel Kokotajlo @DKokotajlo]

Unfortunately, it seems like the intelligence explosion will be happening in 2027 after all. Most of this post analyzes the new METR report (though other sources of evidence are also important). If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. I am scared, sad, and angry. https://t.co/7KWmdc6AZk

[The Midas Project @TheMidasProj]

https://t.co/2r0O8eX7s8

[Trevor Levin @trevposts]

Having just spent the week in San Francisco, I feel like I've truly internalized the insanity of this situation for the first time. I think anyone who has seen me in the last few days can attest that I look like I've seen a ghost.

The leading AI companies are planning to massively accelerate AI research in 2027, which would knowingly endanger everyone on earth. This plan is unacceptable, and we must reject it.

Borrowing from one advocate I spoke to, even granting that it's a competitive, crazy situation, I do not believe any company has even truly tried to do what I think are the morally required duties of people taking such risks in extreme situations. These include:
(1) Trying hard to get out of the competitive situation;
(2) Seeking the informed consent of the public;
(3) Honest deliberation about the risks.

They have obviously not truly tried to solve the coordination problems that push towards this acceleration, either via finding legal ways to coordinate or advocating for effective policy.

I would be shocked to learn that getting off this insane runaway train is a top-few Q4 priority for Dario or Sam (let alone the other CEOs), which seems like the bare minimum. There are indeed some hard technical and policy problems in coordinating without policy intervention, but I simply do not believe that the companies are prioritizing this nearly as much as massively less important matters.

Meanwhile, the companies' track records on policy advocacy range from mediocre to disgraceful, and it is pretty clearly not the top priority of the policy team at any company to advocate for regulation that would enable the government or the companies to avert racing off the cliff.

They have obviously not truly tried to seek informed consent from the public. Whatever your KPIs might be for "informed consent from the public," these KPIs are abysmal. The public clearly does not expect 100 years of AI progress in 2027, and they would not accept it if they did. What they do know about AI development, they dislike and distrust.

I've heard arguments like "informing the public would mean informing China, and maybe they'd steal the weights." I'm sorry, but if you think you have model weights such that China stealing them would constitute a catastrophe on par with human extinction, and your plan is security by obscurity, that is a bad plan.

I also think the companies and their employees suffer from a significant failure of imagination of what kinds of coordination could be possible if the public were aware.

Finally, I don't think they're deliberating honestly, either. For one, I think it is insane to think that any company can truly evaluate its own ability to keep the process of recursive self-improvement under control. The biases towards "yes" are overwhelming.

It's a step forward that the companies have expressed or demonstrated openness to external auditors, but based on METR's reports so far, it seems likely that auditor reports will be heavily redacted (and that the auditors will not have sufficient time by default). The public and broader scientific community are not able to scrutinize their arguments for safety.

Given the strong default (in my view) that bringing a massive number of minds massively faster and smarter than humans would result in our disempowerment, and the serious danger that this would result in mass death, it is unacceptable to subject arguments for safety only to the scrutiny of biased, busy, and scarce company insiders and a handful of external evaluators.

My pleas for the companies follow from the above:
1) Actually fucking try to get the world out of this race;
2) Actually fucking try to alert and inform the public;
3) Actually fucking try to scrutinize your own arguments for the justifiability of this plan, which includes subjecting them to way more external scrutiny than anyone has currently done.

My pleas for policymakers: use your legal levers to get much more information about these plans into the public view. Make it the top priority -- not only of the next Congress, but of this Congress and the White House -- to understand the situation in its full strategic complexity, and work with technical and policy experts to advance regulation that gets us out of this bind. Domestic coordination must be the first priority, but we need to then quickly develop an international framework with our adversaries.

My pleas for the public: do not accept the current plan. Learn about this issue. Call or email your political leaders. Get involved with organizations like @DONOTACCEPTai, @HumansInControl, and @WhoDecidesAI.

And finally: believe in ourselves that we can stop this. It is never time to "panic" -- to make rash, unproductive decisions or to feel paralyzed by fear. It is time for us to feel the urgency and the stakes, to demand better, and to meet the moment. Let's do this. 🫡 ✊

[Eric Neyman @ericneyman]

These are the stakes: To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark.

[Do Not Accept @DONOTACCEPTai]

AI companies admit what they’re building might kill everyone. We don't have to agree to this.

Add your name at https://t.co/Pcg0clMbfV to say: we do not accept your terms.