Kimi K3 Under Fire: Why the U.S. Says Moonshot Stole Anthropic's Fable

The AI tug-of-war between the U.S. and China is heating up once again. This time, U.S. officials are accusing Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI of “distilling” Anthropic’s Fable model to create its own AI model, Kimi K3.

Recently, Kimi K3 has been making waves in tech circles because of its claimed scale and efficiency. Moonshot AI says the model boasts 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight AI model ever built. The company also claims Kimi K3 has advanced capabilities that can rival leading U.S. AI models.

Model distillation is a common AI training technique in which a smaller model learns from the outputs of a larger one. While it’s widely used as a legitimate optimisation method, it can also cross the line into intellectual property theft.

Kimi K3 Beats Claude Opus 4.8, Not Fable 5 or GPT 5.6 Sol

Moonshot Kimi K3 AI model is the most expensive model any Chinese AI lab has released so far.

TechloyDamilare Odedina

The accusations the U.S. has made against Moonshot AI

On Wednesday, U.S. science adviser Michael Kratsios made strong allegations against Moonshot AI in a post on X, saying Moonshot "distilled Anthropic's Fable for the development of its K3 model."