The model that rattled Silicon Valley last week now has Washington’s attention. A senior White House official has accused China’s Moonshot AI of breaking US export controls to build Kimi K3. It reached restricted Nvidia chips, he said, and leaned on American models to do it.
Kratsios directs the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He made the claim in a post on X, Bloomberg reported. Moonshot “acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models,” he said. That breached both US export rules and the labs’ terms of service. The GB300 is part of Nvidia’s Blackwell line, which the US bars from sale to Chinese firms.
The accusation follows months of official unease. Trump officials have been examining whether firms used a loophole to ship advanced chips to Chinese subsidiaries abroad. A May memo reaffirmed the ban on selling Blackwells to Chinese companies.
The post went further on the software side. Moonshot distilled Anthropic’s Fable model to build K3, Kratsios said. It ran a “sophisticated internal platform” for “large scale distillation against US models,” switching access methods to avoid detection. Distillation trains a cheaper model on a rival’s outputs. Kratsios drew a line: legitimate distillation is fair, covert theft of US technology is not. Nvidia and Moonshot did not respond to requests for comment.
