The global AI community has pushed back against the Trump administration’s claims that Moonshot AI’s
distilled US models, citing a lack of justification and arguing that the practice does not constitute intellectual property theft.
In separate posts on X on Thursday, a number of AI experts called the accusations “political” and “reckless”, pointing out that an AI model’s output was not copyrighted.
A Moonshot employee on Thursday hit back at the US officials’ claims that the Chinese company conducted “large-scale, covert industrial distillation” against US models including
cutting-edge Fable 5, by pointing out the narrow window between the release of Kimi K3 and Fable 5.
“Yes, Fable went public on July 1 and K3 launched on July 15. We trained a brand new frontier model in JUST 15 DAYS. Guinness World Record stuff,” Moonshot AI employee Randy Xian wrote on X.
While US officials and AI labs have long attributed Chinese AI’s rapid advancement to distillation, a common industry practice of using the outputs of larger, more capable models to train smaller ones, the White House adviser on Wednesday escalated the accusations by describing the practice as “stealing proprietary US technology”.
Michael Kratsios, US President Donald Trump’s science and technology adviser,
made the accusation on X on Wednesday.
Then US Under Secretary of State Jacob Helberg echoed Kratsios’ remarks, characterising Moonshot AI’s alleged distillation efforts as “a heist of invaluable American Intellectual Property”.