Trump tech official accuses China’s Moonshot AI of stealing from Anthropic

Michael Kratsios, the White House science and technology adviser, alleged on Wednesday that the Beijing-based company had targeted Anthropic’s

most powerful model, Claude Fable 5

, through large-scale “distillation” – a technique that uses the outputs of a more capable model to train or improve another system.

Kratsios did not present evidence that outputs from Fable 5 had been incorporated into Kimi K3; however, the timing of the two models’ releases prompted disagreement among AI

researchers about whether Moonshot could have used the US model to train its latest system.

Kimi K3, released last week, has attracted attention for its performance in coding, reasoning and other complex tasks.

The open-weight model has 2.8 trillion parameters, making it one of the largest AI systems released by a Chinese developer.

The accusations reflect Washington’s growing concern that Chinese developers may be circumventing two pillars of US efforts to preserve its AI advantage: restrictions on access to proprietary American models and controls on exports of advanced semiconductors.