Officials say Moonshot AI accessed restricted Nvidia chips

The White House has accused Chinese artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI of circumventing U.S. export controls to access advanced Nvidia chips, alleging the company used the restricted hardware to train its latest model. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, made the allegations on July 22, 2026, stating that Moonshot obtained servers equipped with Nvidia's GB300 chips and accessed them in Thailand.

The accusations follow the high-profile launch of Moonshot's Kimi K3 model on July 17, 2026. The open-source model, which the company says contains 2.8 trillion parameters, has quickly gained attention for its performance, reportedly rivaling leading U.S. systems from OpenAI and Anthropic in some benchmarks. Its release triggered a selloff in Nvidia's stock as investors weighed the implications for export control enforcement.

Kratsios alleged that Moonshot's actions breached U.S. export rules, which prohibit the sale of advanced Blackwell-generation chips like the GB300 to Chinese entities. He further claimed the company used "knowledge distillation" techniques involving Anthropic's models to develop Kimi K3, a process he...