White House accuses China's Moonshot AI company of stealing US tech secrets
One of China's top AI companies has been accused by the White House of a "large scale" effort to steal US technology models.
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US President Donald Trump's director of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios, claimed Moonshot AI had extracted trade secrets from American company Anthropic.
The argument is the latest in an escalation between China and the US over AI, and reports have suggested it could lead to sanctions on Chinese providers.
Mr Kratsios wrote on X that the US has information that Moonshot AI "distilled" capabilities from Anthropic's Fable AI for the development of its new K3 model.
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The process of distillation relates to when a weaker AI model extracts answers from a larger one.
He said: "We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model.
"They developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large-scale distillation against US models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection.
"Moonshot AI has also acquired [Nvidia] GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.
"Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary US technology and undermining American research is unacceptable."
Anthropic has previously said that Moonshot had used its models more than 3.4 million times - which breaks both its terms of service and its geographical restrictions banning Chinese users from accessing it.
Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, said earlier this week: "If we see, especially, that overseas models are stealing from our great companies, we have the ability to sanction them because of this theft."
Mr Bessent also said on Wednesday that sanctions "will be on the table" if Chinese companies "cross the line" into intellectual property (IP) theft by conducting "industrial-scale distillation attacks".