White House science advisor Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot, the Chinese company behind Kimi K3, of copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using restricted U.S. chips. Kratsios called the alleged covert industrial distillation of U.S. technology 'unacceptable,' amid discussions about banning Chinese open-weight models. Moonshot did not respond to the allegations, and Kratsios provided no further details. Kratsios’ comments echoed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks about finding 'watermarks' of U.S. models in Chinese counterparts, though the exact nature of these watermarks remains unclear. Source: techcrunch
Experts are skeptical that distillation alone could explain Kimi K3’s rapid development. Braden Hancock, a researcher at the Laude Institute, noted that distilling Fable’s capabilities would be logistically impossible within two weeks, as Fable was only publicly available since July 1. Nathan Lambert, an AI researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, added that distillation is becoming less impactful as Chinese models shift toward reinforcement learning. He argued that distilling Fable-like capabilities would likely require advanced reinforcement learning techniques, which demand significant infrastructure and resources. Source: techcrunch
Anthropic previously accused Moonshot, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of distilling its models, citing millions of user interactions identified through IP addresses. However, distillation is not unique to China, with Elon Musk admitting SpaceXAI used it to develop Grok. Experts like Hancock emphasized that Chinese teams are highly skilled, with Moonshot’s founder being a CMU PhD student. The debate also includes concerns over the use of restricted Nvidia chips, which are banned for export to China but may still be accessed through black markets. Source: techcrunch
