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
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on his warnings to Chinese AI companies on Wednesday, saying sanctions remain on the table after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the results of a larger