The American AI industry is split over open models. Those in the industry who say they are all for open AI development have started blaming frontier AI model providers, especially Anthropic, for pushing the Trump administration towards adopting a stricter stance favoring closed models. Now, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is claiming he is just misunderstood. The debate over open-source models was reopened earlier this month when Chinese AI lab Moonshot released Kimi K3, its latest model that ranks higher than most offerings from American giants like Anthropic and OpenAI, and as of Monday, is open-weight. The company was one of several Chinese AI labs that have been accused of IP theft by Anthropic, which claims that the labs violated rules by “illicitly” extracting capabilities from its closed-source models to build their own open-source ones. This process, called “distillation,” works by using a “teacher” model’s output to train another “student” model, and it’s actually fairly common in the AI industry. But the Trump administration and some frontier AI model providers view the often China-led industrial-scale distillation attempts “adversarial,” a characterization that has informed the administration’s latest threats to impose sanctions on Chinese open-source models.