China's Moonshot AI is at the center of a fresh Moonshot AI dispute after a White House adviser accused the company of running a large-scale effort to steal the capabilities of leading U.S. artificial intelligence models. President Donald Trump’s science and technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, made the allegation in a social post on Wednesday.
Kratsios said the company used a method known as distillation, where a weaker AI model pulls answers from a stronger one. He also said Moonshot gained access to restricted Nvidia servers used to train advanced models. In the same post, Kratsios said the U.S. government has information that Moonshot “distilled” capabilities from Anthropic’s Fable AI for use in its K3 model.
The claims arrive as Kimi K3 has drawn global attention since its unveiling last week. Moonshot has said the model can compete with top U.S. technology, and some observers said it had narrowed the gap between Chinese and Western AI systems. The Moonshot AI dispute has now become part of a wider debate over how Chinese firms develop advanced models and whether they are relying on American breakthroughs.
