White House Official Accuses Moonshot AI of Stealing Anthropic's Model

A top White House official publicly accused Moonshot AI of stealing from Anthropic, intensifying the debate over China-based open-source AI models.

"We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable for the development of its K3 model," Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote on X Wednesday morning.

Kratsios said Moonshot AI, the maker of the viral Kimi K3 model, went to great lengths to conceal its actions. "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," he wrote.

Kimi K3 is widely regarded as the most impressive open-source AI model released so far. Moonshot's model has performed at or above the level of Anthropic and OpenAI's leading frontier models in benchmark testing. Both US companies likely spent billions developing those models. Moonshot is expected to make Kimi K3 freely available for download on local devices when it releases the model's full weights next week.

Distillation by itself is not wrong, a point Kratsios stressed. AI labs themselves use the process of training a less powerful model on the output of a more powerful model before releasing updates.