White House Adviser Accuses China’s Moonshot AI of Stealing From Anthropic

The White House Claims China's Moonshot AI Copied Anthropic Tech

The geopolitical tug-of-war over artificial intelligence just escalated in a major way. Senior U.S. officials are publicly accusing Chinese startup Moonshot AI of essentially stealing intellectual property from American labs on an industrial scale.

Michael Kratsios, who leads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, didn't mince words. He stated that the Beijing-based company used a covert "distillation" technique to syphon capabilities from Anthropic's advanced Fable model, using those stolen insights to build its own viral creation, the Kimi K3 model. According to the administration, Moonshot built a custom internal platform specifically designed to harvest U.S. AI outputs while constantly changing its access methods to slip past regional blocks and detection systems.

Bypassing Sanctions and Crossing the Line

The allegations highlight just how tricky it is to enforce international tech barriers. Kratsios claimed that Moonshot managed to get its hands on restricted, high-end Nvidia chips—specifically utilising advanced GB300 servers set up in Thailand—to power its heavy training pipelines.

Now, in the tech world, "model distillation"—training a smaller, leaner AI using the outputs of a smarter one—is actually a pretty common practice for making things run faster and cheaper. But the Trump administration drew a very firm line in the sand, labelling what Moonshot did as "covert industrial-scale distillation". Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent chimed in too, warning that Washington is actively hunting for foreign AI models that carry hidden fingerprints of U.S. large language models and hinting at potential sanctions for systematic data theft.

High Stakes for the Global AI Race

The timing couldn't be more delicate. These explosive accusations come just weeks before President Donald Trump is set to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington for a high-profile summit meant to smooth over bilateral tensions.

Back in the tech sector, however, the controversy is touching a raw nerve. Everyone's been wondering how Chinese labs manage to hit frontier-level performance at a fraction of Silicon Valley's budget. With Kimi K3 turning heads globally and going toe-to-toe with Western models on coding and performance charts,