Experts say exploiting Anthropic’s Fable isn’t how Kimi K3 got so good
US officials allege that Chinese company Moonshot AI developed its Kimi K3 model by illicitly copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM using restricted chips. However, AI researchers are skeptical of these claims, noting that the rapid development timeline makes simple model distillation unlikely.
Why it matters
This highlights the escalating geopolitical tensions surrounding AI development, intellectual property theft, and the effectiveness of US export controls on advanced semiconductor technology.
White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said that Moonshot, the Chinese company behind the Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, built its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips that aren’t cleared for export to China.
“Large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology and undermining American research is unacceptable,” Kratsios wrote , amid reported discussions about banning Chinese open-weight models that have roiled the AI sector. Moonshot did not respond to questions about its training process, and Kratsios did not share more details about the sources of his allegations.
Kratsios’ tweet echoed comments from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that “we are finding watermarks of our U.S. large language models on many of the Chinese models, and that that’s unacceptable.” It’s not clear what those watermarks consist of, and the Treasury Department did not respond to a query.
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