White House Accuses China's Moonshot AI of Illegally Copying Anthropic's Model

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has accused Beijing-based Moonshot AI of using a technique called 'model distillation' to clone Anthropic's Fable model in order to build its own Kimi K3 AI. Officials allege Moonshot ran large-scale distillation against US AI models through a covert internal platform that cycled access methods to evade detection. The company is also accused of acquiring restricted Nvidia Blackwell-generation chips via Thailand to circumvent US export controls, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent raising the possibility of sanctions and export-control blacklisting. However, experts have cast doubt on the strongest version of the claim, noting that Anthropic's Fable model only became public on July 1 and Kimi K3 shipped just 15 days later — too short a window to primarily build a model of that scale through distillation. The accusations remain unproven, but the case highlights growing scrutiny around AI model provenance and the legal and commercial risks of training on a competitor's outputs.