Washington, United States – The White House has accused Chinese AI startup Moonshot of illicitly accessing restricted U.S. technology to develop its flagship Kimi K3 model, alleging the company used servers equipped with Nvidia’s Blackwell-generation GB300 chips and routed training workloads through GB300-enabled infrastructure in Thailand. Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Moonshot’s actions appear to violate U.S. export controls that bar sales of high-end Blackwell hardware to Chinese companies, as well as the terms of service set by American AI developers whose proprietary models were allegedly used in training. The Bureau of Industry and Security is investigating whether Chinese entities bypassed restrictions by relying on overseas subsidiaries or cloud services hosted in third countries such as Thailand. Nvidia, which has previously stated that it complies with all export control regulations and enforces them across its sales channels, did not immediately comment on the latest allegations. Beijing, China – The dispute comes shortly after Moonshot released its Kimi K3 system, an open-weight model that analysts say sharply narrowed the performance gap between leading Chinese AI labs and top U.S. frontier developers. Moonshot claims K3 ranks just behind OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 in benchmark tests, a level of capability that reports say has completely upended earlier market expectations that Chinese AI significantly trailed the United States. According to Kratsios, Moonshot boosted K3’s performance by building an internal platform for large-scale model distillation, a process in which powerful “teacher” models generate outputs that train smaller “student” models to mimic their abilities. The White House accusation marks a notable escalation in U.S.-China technology tensions by directly tying a named Chinese AI firm to alleged violations involving Nvidia’s most advanced chips and proprietary American AI systems.

Prepared by Lauren Mitchell and reviewed by editorial team.