The release of Kimi K3 has raised questions about whether U.S. AI giants are sufficiently far ahead of their Chinese rivals [File]
\| Photo Credit: REUTERS

Chinese AI firm Moonshot has been accused of ‘distilling’ the capabilities of Anthropic’s cutting-edge AI model in order to develop its own K3 model, by a U.S. government official.

Moonshot made headlines worldwide last week with the release of its open-weight, 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model.

“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model. To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models,” posted U.S. President Donald Trump’s science and tech adviser Michael Kratsios on X on Wednesday (July 22, 2026)

The official went on to add that the U.S. condemned “stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research” via what it called industrial distillation.

The release of Kimi K3 has raised questions about whether U.S. AI giants are sufficiently far ahead of their Chinese rivals, which claim to be releasing competitive models at lower costs.

In a blog post this February, Anthropic claimed that it identified “industrial-scale campaigns” by DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax to improve their own AI models via distillation techniques.

“These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts, in violation of our terms of service and regional access restrictions,” stated Anthropic in the blog post.

Published - July 23, 2026 05:18 pm IST