{"slug": "u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip", "title": "U.S. Accuses Moonshot AI of Using Restricted NVIDIA Chips, Stealing IP", "summary": "White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios accused Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI of illegally accessing NVIDIA GB300 chips in Thailand and conducting covert distillation attacks on Anthropic's Fable model to build its Kimi K3 system with 2.8 trillion parameters. The allegations, which Moonshot has not commented on, come as U.S. lawmakers advance the Remote Access Security Act to restrict cloud-based access to American hardware, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that sanctions or Entity List designations could follow if IP theft is confirmed.", "body_md": "Tensions in the U.S.-China technology race escalated this week after a top White House official publicly accused Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI of illegally accessing advanced NVIDIA Corp. hardware and stealing intellectual property from American competitors to build its latest model.\n\nMichael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Wednesday on X that Moonshot acquired servers equipped with NVIDIA’s cutting-edge GB300 systems and accessed them remotely in Thailand to train its newly released model, Kimi K3. The GB300 chips, built on NVIDIA’s advanced Blackwell architecture, fall under strict U.S. export controls banning their sale to China.\n\nKratsios also claimed Moonshot developed a “sophisticated internal platform” to covertly perform industrial-scale distillation attacks on Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation allows smaller systems to copy the performance of larger, pre-trained neural networks.\n\n“Legitimate AI distillation used to create smaller, more efficient models plays a vital role in this open innovation ecosystem,” Kratsios said. “However, large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable.”\n\nThe allegations follow Moonshot’s unveiling of Kimi K3, a massive open-source model featuring 2.8 trillion parameters. Moonshot claims the system closes the performance gap with top-tier Western models such as Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and surpasses them on certain benchmarks.\n\nThe dispute highlights growing anxiety in Washington over China’s potential to narrow the AI capability gap despite stringent trade barriers. While U.S. export controls limit direct chip sales to China, Chinese tech companies have increasingly leveraged offshore data centers and cloud service networks to access high-performance American computing power.\n\nTo address these workarounds, U.S. lawmakers are pushing the Remote Access Security Act (RASA). The bipartisan legislation, which passed the House of Representatives in January and currently awaits Senate action, aims to expand export restrictions to cover remote, cloud-based access to critical American hardware and software.\n\n“It is well known that China is using American compute both within the country and abroad,” said Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. “It demonstrates just how far ahead the U.S. is on compute. American compute is the foundation for the AI race today.”\n\nThe White House signal indicates a readiness to take swift punitive measures. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that the administration is actively investigating foreign intelligence reports of watermark traces left inside Chinese models.\n\n“When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table,” Bessent said.\n\nA spokesperson for the U.K. embassy of the People’s Republic of China previously rejected similar accusations, telling reporters that China opposes “baseless allegations and malicious smears against its AI development.”\n\nRepresentatives for NVIDIA, Moonshot AI, and Anthropic have not yet provided official comments on the latest claims.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip", "canonical_source": "https://techstrong.ai/articles/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip/", "published_at": "2026-07-23 15:11:18+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-23 15:12:39.761930+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-chips", "ai-ethics", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Moonshot AI", "NVIDIA", "White House Office of Science and Technology Policy", "Michael Kratsios", "Anthropic", "Scott Bessent", "Remote Access Security Act", "Tony Blair Institute for Global Change"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/u-s-accuses-moonshot-ai-of-using-restricted-nvidia-chips-stealing-ip.jsonld"}}