A White House adviser accused China’s Moonshot AI of a “large-scale” effort to steal the capabilities of leading American artificial intelligence (AI) models.

US President Donald Trump’s Science and Technology Advisor Michael Kratsios said Moonshot AI carried out the campaign through what is known as distillation, when a weaker AI model extracts answers from a stronger one.

Moonshot also gained access to state-of-the-art restricted Nvidia servers to train its models, Kratsios said in a social post., external On Wednesday.

The BBC has contacted Moonshot, the Chinese embassy in Washington, Anthropic, the White House and Nvidia for comment.

Kratsios said in X that the US government has information that Moonshot AI “distilled” capabilities from Anthropic’s Fable AI for the development of its K3 model.

Kimi K3 attracted attention around the world after its unveiling last week, with many believing it had narrowed the gap between Western and Chinese AI models. Moonshot said its K3 model is capable of rivaling the best American technology.

Moonshot also likely used servers powered by Nvidia’s GB300 Grace Blackwell computing platform, Kratsios said.

Washington restricted the export of Nvidia’s most advanced chips in 2022 over fears they could be used by the Chinese military.

Since then, governments around the world have cracked down on chip smuggling.

Kratsios’ accusations come just a day after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday that the United States would examine whether Chinese AI models have stolen capabilities from their American rivals.

On Wednesday, Bessent also said sanctions “will be on the table” when Chinese companies “cross the line” and commit intellectual property (IP) theft by carrying out “industrial-scale distillation attacks.”

“We support open source AI and the innovation it unlocks. But open source is not open season on American intellectual property,” Bessent said on social media.

The Chinese government has yet to issue a public statement in response to the latest allegations, but has previously said that its country’s AI development was “the result of its own dedication and effort, as well as international cooperation.”

The United States’ increased scrutiny of Chinese AI companies also comes as Trump is expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in September.

Moonshot AI will release Kimi K3 as an open source model on July 27, making it the first of its scale that developers and the public can freely download and customize.

In June, Anthropic accused Chinese e-commerce and technology giant Alibaba of “illicitly” extracting the capabilities of its Claude AI models through distillation attacks.

Anthropic urged Congress to penalize the companies behind the alleged attacks and step up measures to prevent the theft of American technology.

The White House said in April it would work more closely with American artificial intelligence companies to combat “industrial-scale campaigns” by foreign rivals to steal technology.

Kratsios said in a memo at the time that the campaigns aimed to “systematically undermine American research and development and access proprietary information.”