WASHINGTON - The United States on Wednesday accused China's startup Moonshot AI of stealing artificial intelligence technology from Anthropic's most advanced model, Claude Fable 5, amid easing tensions between the two countries preparing for a high-stakes summit in September.
Michael Kratsios, top White House technology adviser, said in an X post that the United States has information indicating that Moonshot had "distilled" Fable 5 to support the development of the Beijing-based company's newly released Kimi K3 model.
Kratsios also alleged that Moonshot had acquired servers equipped with powerful Nvidia AI chips known as GB300s and had accessed them in Thailand for "likely" training its AI models.
The United States prohibits the sale of the high-end chips to Chinese companies.
"Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem," he wrote. "However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable."
The U.S. claim, made by the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, concerns a technique called "distillation" in the industry, in which a less advanced AI model is trained on outputs from a more capable one.
In a related development, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned in a separate X post that Chinese companies could face sanctions should they conduct "covert industrial-scale distillation attacks."
Bessent did not mention any Chinese companies by name.
The U.S. accusation and warning came even as President Donald Trump is scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping in September in Washington.
In mid-May in Beijing, Trump and Xi agreed to stabilize the U.S.-China relationship, regardless of friction over numerous issues.
As part of preparations for the upcoming summit, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio held talks with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Manila on Wednesday.
