Moonshot accused by U.S. official of distilling Anthropic’s Fable
A U.S. official has accused Chinese AI firm Moonshot of using 'industrial distillation' to copy Anthropic’s Fable model for its own Kimi K3 AI. This follows previous allegations of large-scale data scraping by Chinese labs to train competitive models.
Why it matters
The accusation highlights the escalating technological and intellectual property tensions between the U.S. and China in the field of artificial intelligence.
Chinese AI firm Moonshot has been accused of ‘distilling’ the capabilities of Anthropic’s cutting-edge AI model in order to develop its own K3 model, by a U.S. government official.
Moonshot made headlines worldwide last week with the release of its open-weight, 2.8 trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model.
“We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model. To do this they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation against U.S. models, allowing them to quickly switch between multiple methods of access to avoid detection. Moonshot AI has also acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models,” posted U.S. President Donald Trump’s science and tech adviser Michael Kratsios on X on Wednesday (July 22, 2026)
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