ChinaTalk investigation: US data brokers sell about $500M in RL training environments to Chinese AI labs

US data brokers including Mercor, Surge AI, AfterQuery and Turing are selling roughly $500 million worth of training data, some of it RL environments, to Chinese AI labs, according to a ChinaTalk investigation. The report identifies at least nine US firms involved and says Chinese labs deliberately buy products already sold to Anthropic or OpenAI to skip costly in-house development, savings that matter given China's chip memory bottlenecks. ChinaTalk notes RL environments are largely unregulated by export controls and argues the Bureau of Industry and Security should apply existing controls to dual-use coding and biology environments, while stressing Chinese labs still trail US peers by at least a few months.