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Trump adviser accuses Moonshot AI of copying US Anthropic model
The accusation centers on Moonshot AI allegedly using “distillation” tied to Anthropic’s most powerful model and obtaining restricted Nvidia chips abroad, as Washington boosts scrutiny after Kimi K3’s release.
The Trump administration has accused Beijing-based AI start-up Moonshot AI of covertly extracting capabilities from leading US artificial intelligence models and obtaining restricted Nvidia chips abroad, escalating US scrutiny of the company after the release of its Kimi K3 system, according to SCMP Economy.
Michael Kratsios, the White House science and technology adviser, alleged that Moonshot targeted Anthropic’s most powerful model, Claude Fable 5, using a large-scale distillation technique that trains another system from the outputs of a more capable model. Kratsios did not provide evidence that outputs from Fable 5 were incorporated into Kimi K3, but the close timing of the two model releases sparked disagreement among AI researchers about whether Moonshot could have used the US model to train its latest system.
Moonshot’s Kimi K3, released last week, has drawn attention for performance in coding, reasoning and other complex tasks. The model is described as an open-weight system with 2.8 trillion parameters, one of the largest AI systems released by a Chinese developer, SCMP Economy reported.
The allegations reflect Washington’s broader concern that Chinese developers may be circumventing two pillars of US efforts to preserve its AI lead: restrictions on access to proprietary American models and controls on exports of advanced semiconductors.