Senior White House official accuses Moonshot AI of copying Anthropic’s leading frontier model
A senior White House official has accused Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI of using so-called “distillation” techniques to essentially pirate the capabilities of Anthropic PBC’s most powerful models in its own, open-source AI systems.
“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” said Michael Kratsios (pictured), director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a post on X on Wednesday.
Kratsios was referring to Moonshot AI’s new Kimi K3 model, which was pronounced as the world’s largest open-weights model when it was released last week to great fanfare due to its prowess, which matches the capabilities of Anthropic’s and OpenAI Group PBC’s best AI systems. He added that the company went to great lengths to try and hide what it had done.
“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 claimed.
