As Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) continues to pressure leading Western models, lawmakers and industry leaders are becoming increasingly worried about AI distillation. The concept gained mainstream attention in early 2026 when Jeff Dean, the AI lead at Google, appeared on a podcast where he discussed the company’s efforts to improve its models.
He noted that distillation is a method AI firms can use to boost the capabilities of their smaller models, typically by distilling a broader model down into a smaller one. Months later, AI distillation has become a trending topic across Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley amidst advances in Chinese AI.
Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based lab formed in 2023, recently made waves when it released Kimi K3, a model that has proved it can compete with models from industry leaders OpenAI and Anthropic. Chinese labs like Moonshot AI usually release open-weight models that users can download, tweak, and run locally, while American AI firms keep their source code private and only sell access to their models.
This makes Chinese models a lot more attractive to individual users than Western-made alternatives. According to some government officials, the reason Chinese-made AI models like Kimi K3 have caught up to American models is because their developers are distilling larger models made in the West.
Moonshot has specifically been accused of ‘stealing’ from Anthropic and distilling Claude AI to build Kimi K3. Technology adviser Michael Kratsios also argues that Moonshot used cutting-edge servers from Nvidia to train its models. He is one of several government officials who claim Moonshot stole American intellectual property.
Last week, he posted a statement on social media claiming the Trump administration had learned that Moonshot specifically distilled Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3. According to Kratsios, the Chinese AI company built a ‘sophisticated platform’ that allowed it to distill American AI models at a massive scale.
This internal platform helped Moonshot access different U.S. models for distillation without detection, he says. Distillation is controversial in many circles as it can help developers build competitive AI models without sinking millions to billions of dollars into the development process.
SecurityPal founder Pukar Hamal likens it to one student attending lectures, studying the reading material and doing their homework, and another student copying their work at the end. In the wake of Kimi K3’s release and the subsequent furor about distillation, over two dozen companies published a letter exhorting lawmakers to avoid restricting open-weight AI models ‘prematurely’. They argue that distillation is a tool most AI companies use to improve, evolve, and validate their models, and any premature restrictions could push AI innovation to foreign markets.
As the race for tech dominance between the U.S. and China reaches fever pitch, industry players like D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NYSE: QBTS) could be becoming increasingly concerned about the possible disruptions that the rivalry could have on the markets that their innovations may or may not be restricted from accessing.
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