美 재무부, 중국 AI 문샷의 앤스로픽 모델 불법 도용 의혹에 제재 경고

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent doubled down on his warnings to Chinese AI companies on Wednesday, saying that sanctions remain on the table after a White House official accused Moonshot of improperly distilling Anthropic’s Fable model. Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one. While this process can infringe on intellectual property rights, it’s also widely used as a legitimate optimization method. “Open source is not open season on American IP,” Bessent posted on X . “When [Chinese] firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table.” Earlier this week, Bessent stated that the U.S. government would examine open source models from China for signs of intellectual property theft and impose sanctions if found. Bessent's latest remarks come hours after the White House's science and technology policy chief Michael Kratsios accused the China-based Moonshot of conducting large scale distillation against U.S. models. He alleged that Moonshot had acquired Nvidia’s “GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models,” raising questions about whether the firm violated U.S. export control rules. The GB300 servers are part of Nvidia’s Blackwell generation, which are banned from being sold to Chinese companies. Some experts dispute the idea that Kimi K3 could have been developed primarily through distillation from Fable, which has only been publicly available since July 1. Moonshot released K3 last week as an open-weight model, and its advanced capabilities have called into question the underlying business models of leading U.S. AI labs, casting doubt on whether they can continue to justify the enormous capital requirements underpinning the frontier AI race. The episode has also intensified a broader debate in Washington over the influx of Chinese open models. Some, including former White House AI advisor and current OpenAI Head of Strategic Futures, Dean Ball, have argued that the U.S. should restrict or effectively ban the use of Chinese open-weight models to preserve America’s technological advantage and mitigate potential national security risks. TechCrunch has reached out to Moonshot and the Treasury for comment. Topics AI , chinese ai , Government & Policy , kimi , moonshot , open models , open source When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Rebecca Bellan Senior Reporter Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications. You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal. View Bio October 13 - 15 San Francisco Scale faster. Grow your portfolio. Gain practical expertise. No matter your goal, Disrupt can empower you. Save up to $330 toda y! REGISTER NOW Most Popular Jack Dorsey is taking on Slack with Buzz, a group chat platform for teams and their AI agents Amanda Silberling Light made a flip phone — it's colorful and it's cheap Amanda Silberling AI music generator Suno breach affects 55M users, per Have I Been Pwned Zack Whittaker Anthropic's landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved Kirsten Korosec Google is working on a new AI chip designed to make Gemini more efficient Lucas Ropek Judge pauses $110B Paramount-Warner Bros. merger Aisha Malik Coca-Cola suspended production at its Fairlife dairy after a ransomware attack Zack Whittaker