White House accuses Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's Fable to build Kimi K3

The AI race gains a formal theft allegation, days before the accused model ships as open weights.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Wednesday that China's Moonshot AI used a covert platform to distill Anthropic's Fable model and acquired restricted Blackwell generation Nvidia servers in Thailand, skirting US export controls. Kimi K3, the Moonshot system at the center of the claim, has been climbing coding leaderboards and is slated to ship as free, open weights within days, which would put the contested model in anyone's hands. It is one of the sharpest public claims yet that a Chinese lab built a frontier system on American work, and it turns model distillation from a research debate into a trade enforcement fight.