A White House adviser has accused China’s Moonshot AI of a “large-scale” effort to steal the capabilities of top US artificial intelligence (AI) models.
Michael Kratsios, a science and technology adviser to US President Donald Trump, said Moonshot AI ran the campaign through distillation – when a weaker AI model extracts answers from a stronger AI model.
Kratsios said in a social post that Moonshot also gained access to restricted state-of-the-art Nvidia servers to train its models., external On Wednesday.
The BBC has contacted Moonshot, Anthropic, the White House and Nvidia for comment.
Kratsios said on X that the US government has information that Moonshot AI has “distilled” capabilities from Anthropic’s Fable AI for the development of its K3 model.
The Kimi K3 attracted worldwide attention after its unveiling last week, with many believing it bridged the gap between Western and Chinese AI models. Moonshot said its K3 model is capable of competing with top American technology.
Kratsios said Moonshot likely also used servers powered by Nvidia’s GB300 Grace Blackwell computing platform.
Washington banned exports of Nvidia’s most advanced chips in 2022 over concerns they could be used by the Chinese military.
Since then, governments around the world have cracked down on chip smuggling.
Kratsios’ allegations come just a day after Treasury Secretary Scott Besant said the US would investigate whether Chinese AI models stole capabilities from American rivals.
“We’ve seen a lot of talk about the open-source model coming in and threatening the big language model in the US,” Besant told Fox Business on Tuesday.
“If we see, in particular, that foreign models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to ban them,” he said.
The increased scrutiny of Chinese AI companies by the US also comes as Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in September.
Moonshot AI will release the Kimi K3 as an open-source model on July 27, making it the first model of its scale that can be freely downloaded and customized by developers and members of the public.
In June, Anthropic accused Chinese e-commerce and tech giant Alibaba of “illegally” extracting the capabilities of its cloud AI models using distillation attacks.
Anthropic urged Congress to punish the companies behind the alleged attacks and increase measures to prevent American technology from being stolen.
The White House said in April it would work more closely with US AI companies to counter an “industrial-scale campaign” by foreign rivals to steal technology.
Kratsios said in a memo at the time that the purpose of the campaigns was to “systematically undermine US research and development and access to proprietary information”.
