TL;DR
Brockman called Kimi K3 “pretty good” but said it is too early to tell if Moonshot distilled from OpenAI, as the White House accused the startup of IP theft
Brockman acknowledged the Chinese model's quality in a Bloomberg interview on Tuesday but said it is too early to determine whether Moonshot trained on OpenAI's outputs, hours after OSTP Director Michael Kratsios accused the startup of accessing banned Nvidia chips and running large-scale distillation
Brockman called Kimi K3 “pretty good” but said it is too early to tell if Moonshot distilled from OpenAI, as the White House accused the startup of IP theft
OpenAI president Greg Brockman called Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 “pretty good” in a Bloomberg interview on Tuesday, a rare public acknowledgement from a US frontier lab that a Chinese rival has produced a competitive model. Brockman said it is “too early” to determine whether Moonshot trained K3 by distilling outputs from OpenAI’s own systems, a practice the company has repeatedly accused Chinese labs of using. His measured tone stood in sharp contrast to the White House, which hours earlier had levelled its most specific accusations yet against the Chinese startup.
OSTP Director Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot of accessing banned Nvidia chips through intermediaries in Thailand and of conducting large-scale distillation against American AI models, according to Bloomberg. The accusations landed the same day that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would scrutinise Chinese open-source models for stolen intellectual property and could impose sanctions within weeks. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pushed back against the alarm, calling Chinese open models “excellent” and urging the government to let American firms use them.
The distillation charge has been building for months. In February, Anthropic accused Moonshot, DeepSeek, and MiniMax of running roughly 16 million exchanges through about 24,000 fraudulent accounts to extract knowledge from its Claude models. OpenAI has made similar complaints, and the White House now appears to be treating the allegations as a matter of national security rather than a commercial dispute between rival labs.
Brockman framed OpenAI’s position around the company’s infrastructure investments, arguing that the US has a “huge advantage” because of the billions it has poured into compute. He said open-weight models like K3 are not truly free because running them at scale still requires expensive hardware, a point that undercuts the narrative that Chinese labs can simply give away frontier-level AI. He estimated that China remains roughly four months behind the US in overall model development.
K3 is a nearly three-trillion-parameter open-weight model that Moonshot released on July 16, and it has rattled Washington and Wall Street by matching or beating the best American systems on several benchmarks. The model topped Arena’s frontend coding leaderboard within 24 hours of launch, placing ahead of both Anthropic and OpenAI’s flagship offerings. Moonshot is pricing K3 at a fraction of what US labs charge, accelerating the commoditisation of the model layer that investors have been warning about since DeepSeek’s price cuts earlier this year.
Brockman, who donated to a Trump-aligned super PAC, declined to wade into the debate over whether Chinese models should be banned. He instead stressed that OpenAI believes open models are important for “democratizing access to AI,” a position that aligns him more closely with Huang than with the White House officials pressing for sanctions.
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