A senior White House official has accused Chinese artificial intelligence startup Moonshot AI of unlawfully using restricted United States technology and proprietary AI models to develop its flagship Kimi K3 system.
Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, took to social media that Moonshot acquired servers equipped with NVIDIA’s GB300 chips and used GB300-enabled infrastructure in Thailand to train its AI models. He claimed the activities breached both US export control regulations and the terms of service of American AI developers.
The allegations centre on NVIDIA’s Blackwell-generation GB300 platform, one of the most advanced AI computing systems currently available. The United States prohibits the export of Blackwell hardware to Chinese companies, although lower-tier processors such as the H200 have been exempted under existing rules.
Kratsios further alleged that Moonshot’s use of overseas infrastructure may have enabled the company to circumvent US export restrictions. His comments come as federal investigators at the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), the agency responsible for enforcing US technology export controls, examine whether Chinese firms have used overseas subsidiaries or cloud infrastructure in third countries, including Thailand, to access restricted computing resources.
NVIDIA has consistently maintained that it complies with all applicable US export regulations and enforces strict compliance throughout its sales channels. The company did not immediately respond to the latest allegations.
The dispute follows the recent launch of Moonshot’s open-weight Kimi K3 model, which has attracted significant attention across the AI industry after demonstrating performance that analysts say has narrowed the gap between Chinese developers and leading American AI laboratories.
Moonshot has claimed that Kimi K3 rivals the world’s most advanced AI models, stating that it ranks behind only OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 in benchmark evaluations.
According to Kratsios, Moonshot’s progress was supported by an internal platform designed to carry out model distillation at scale. Model distillation is a machine learning technique in which a smaller model is trained using the outputs generated by a more advanced “teacher” model, allowing developers to reproduce many of its capabilities with significantly lower computing requirements.
The White House allegations are likely to intensify scrutiny of China’s AI industry and reinforce US efforts to prevent advanced American semiconductors and AI technologies from reaching Chinese developers amid the ongoing technological rivalry between the two countries.
