White House officials accused Chinese AI company Moonshot of gaining access. NvidiaEven though its advanced chips are prohibited by export regulations.
Moonshot announced the Kimi K3 on Friday. It closes the performance gap with frontier models such as Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, and even outperforms them in some benchmarks. It is the largest open source model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters representing the size of a neural network.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a post on X on Wednesday that the Chinese company “has acquired GB300-equipped servers, has access to Thailand’s GB300, and will likely train AI models.”
Nvidia, Moonshot AI, the White House and the British Embassy in the People’s Republic of China have been contacted for comment.
Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips are subject to export restrictions to China, but some less powerful semiconductors are allowed to be shipped there. Nvidia’s GB300 chip is one generation behind the state-of-the-art Vera Rubin system and is still considered cutting-edge.
US-China AI arms race
The release comes as the race for AI supremacy between the US and China intensifies. In addition to restricting access to critical AI hardware, U.S. lawmakers are also considering ways to curb the growing adoption of Chinese AI models by Western companies.
The Wall Street Journal reported in March that ByteDance is gathering computing power outside of China to strengthen its AI efforts. ByteDance has been contacted for comment.
The US aims to close export control loopholes that allow Chinese companies to access advanced AI chips.
The proposed bipartisan bill, the Remote Access Security Act (RASA), seeks to expand U.S. export controls to include cloud-based remote access to critical hardware and software. The bill passed the House in January and now awaits consideration in the Senate.
“China’s use of American computers at home and abroad is well known,” said Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change think tank.
“This shows how advanced the United States is in computing,” he added. “American computing is the foundation of today’s AI race.”
The U.S. reportedly allowed 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips in May, but a senior U.S. trade official said earlier this month that “very few” shipments had been shipped to China and Hong Kong. With access to key AI chips severely restricted, Chinese tech companies are increasingly looking to domestically produced alternatives.
Kratsios, the White House official, also said, “We have information that Moonshot AI extracted Anthropic fables to develop the K3 model,” echoing Anthropic’s claims earlier this year that it conducted an “industrial-scale” campaign to extract information from the model.
By extracting knowledge from better-trained models through distillation, smaller AI models can mimic the performance of larger, pre-trained models.
A spokesperson for the British Embassy in the People’s Republic of China previously told CNBC that the country “stands against baseless claims and malicious defamation of AI development.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday threatened sanctions against Chinese companies responsible for the distillation attacks.
In a post on
