US data brokers sell $500M in RL training to Chinese AI labs
at least nine us firms sell ai training data to chinese labs saving them on compute costs and development time.
a chinatalk investigation found at least nine us data firms selling ai training data to chinese labs. these firms, including mercor, surge ai, afterquery, and turing, sell reinforcement learning environments that help chinese labs save on compute costs and development time. chinese labs use these environments, previously sold to companies like openai and anthropic, to train their models. this trade raises concerns over security risks in areas like cybersecurity and biology.