USA accuses China's Moonshot of intellectual property theft and threatens sanctions

The US Department of the Treasury has warned that strict measures may be taken against Moonshot, one of China's leading artificial intelligence (AI) startups. The Washington administration accuses the Chinese company of illegally "distilling" (training by copying) the Fable model belonging to the American laboratory Anthropic. This situation indicates that the technological cold war between the two countries has reached a new stage. This is reported by Techcrunch.com reports .

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated on his X page: "Open source is not a license to steal American intellectual property." According to him, if it is proven that Chinese firms have secretly engaged in industrial-scale theft, they will be added to the US Entity List and face strict sanctions. TechCrunch writes that the accusations from White House officials triggered this conflict.

Model distillation and technological theft

Model distillation is a method of training a smaller and more efficient AI model based on the results of a larger and smarter model. Although this method is widely used in the tech world for optimization, US officials believe Moonshot did this without authorization and in violation of intellectual property rights. In particular, Moonshot's new Kimi K3 model is suspected of misappropriating the achievements of Anthropic's Fable model.

Furthermore, White House science and technology official Michael Kratsios also accused Moonshot of bypassing export controls. According to reports, the company gained access to NVIDIA's state-of-the-art GB300 servers via Thailand. However, the sale of these Blackwell-generation chips to Chinese companies is prohibited by US law.

Debates in Washington and consequences

This conflict has intensified the attitude in US political circles toward Chinese open-source models. Experts like Dean Ball, head of OpenAI's strategic future division, emphasize that to maintain American technological superiority and ensure national security, the use of Chinese-developed open-weight models should be restricted or completely banned.

At the same time, some independent experts are skeptical that Moonshot's Kimi K3 model was created in such a short time solely through distillation. This is because the Fable model was released in July of this year, and K3 was announced shortly thereafter. If Chinese models can truly compete with America's most advanced developments, it could jeopardize the multi-billion dollar business models of US AI labs.

While neither Moonshot nor the US Treasury has provided detailed responses to official inquiries, the escalation is expected to lead to new restrictions and trade barriers in the global technology market. This process is also important for specialists in Uzbekistan, as global restrictions in the AI field could affect future access to open-source technologies.