White House accuses China's Moonshot AI of stealing Anthropic's model — but experts doubt the timeline

White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios has accused Chinese company Moonshot AI of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build its own Kimi K3, and of accessing export-banned Nvidia GB300 chips through Thailand. TechCrunch reports.

What the accusation says

According to Kratsios, Moonshot

“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”

— Michael Kratsios, White House science and technology policy director

Quote source: TechCrunch.

Distillation is a technique where a smaller model is trained to mimic a more capable one's outputs without the rights holder's permission. Separately, CNBC reports officials allege Moonshot reached Nvidia GB300 (Blackwell-generation) servers — banned for export to China — through infrastructure in Thailand.

The Treasury's response

“Open source is not open season on American IP. When [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.”

— Scott Bessent, U.S. Treasury Secretary

Quote source: TechCrunch.

Why it's not so clear-cut

An important caveat: some independent experts question the White House's own version. Anthropic's Fable model only became publicly available on July 1, 2026, and Kimi K3 launched as an open-weight model just weeks later — a timeline several researchers say is too short for the large-scale distillation officials describe. Moonshot AI has not responded to the accusations; Beijing called similar claims baseless when Anthropic itself raised them earlier this year.

Not the first IP fight in AI

Accusations of stolen AI technology aren't new — earlier this month Apple filed a similar lawsuit against OpenAI. We covered that case in detail. The U.S. Treasury has already floated sanctions and an Entity List export blacklisting for Moonshot.

Nothing here should be taken as financial advice — just information to consider.