A White House official has blamed Chinese AI company Moonshot of access NvidiaAlthough export controls prohibit them from doing so, they have advanced chips.
Moonshot introduced Kimi K3 on Friday. It closes the performance gap with top models such as Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol and even outperforms them in some benchmarks. It is the largest open source model to date, with 2.8 trillion parameters relative to the size of its neural network.
The Chinese company “acquired GB300-equipped servers and accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a post on X on Wednesday.
Nvidia, Moonshot AI, the White House and the British Embassy of the People’s Republic of China have been contacted for comment.
Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips are subject to export restrictions to China, but some less powerful semiconductors are allowed to be shipped to the country. Nvidia’s GB300 chips are a generation behind Vera Rubin’s top systems and are still considered cutting-edge.
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The AI arms race between the USA and China
The release comes as the race for AI supremacy between the US and China is heating up. In addition to restricting access to key AI hardware, lawmakers in America are also considering how to curb the increasing adoption of Chinese AI models by Western companies.
ByteDance was reportedly building computing power outside of China to advance AI efforts, according to a Wall Street Journal report in March. ByteDance has been contacted for comment.
The US wants to close loopholes in export controls that allow Chinese companies to access advanced AI chips.
The Remote Access Security Act (RASA), a bipartisan legislative proposal, aims to extend U.S. export controls to cloud-based remote access to critical hardware and software. It passed the House of Representatives in January and is awaiting a decision in the Senate.
“It is well known that China uses American computers both at home and abroad,” said Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change think tank.
“It shows how far ahead the US is in data processing,” he added. “American computers are the basis for AI competition today.”
While the US reportedly gave approval to 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips in May, a senior US trade official said earlier this month that “very few” had been shipped to China and Hong Kong. With access to leading AI chips severely limited, Chinese tech companies are increasingly looking for homegrown alternatives.
Kratsios, the White House official, also said, “We have information that Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic’s Fable for the development of its K3 model,” repeating Anthropic’s claims earlier this year about “industrial-scale” campaigns to extract information from its model.
Distillation allows smaller AI models to mimic the performance of larger, pre-trained models by extracting knowledge from the better-trained model.
A spokesperson for the British Embassy of the People’s Republic of China previously told CNBC that the country “rejects baseless accusations and malicious slander against its AI development.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Wednesday threatened sanctions against Chinese companies that carry out distillation attacks.
“If PRC companies conduct industrial-scale covert distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and entry on the Entity List will be on the table,” he said in a post on X.
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/23/moonshot-kimi-nvidia-ai-chips-export-ban.html
