Moonshot AI accessed Nvidia's chips despite Chinese export ban, White House official says

A White House official has accused Chinese AI company Moonshot of accessing Nvidia's advanced chips, despite export controls banning them from doing so. Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3 on Friday. It closes the performance gap with frontier models including Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT 5.6 Sol, even surpassing them on some benchmarks. It's the largest open source model so far, with 2.8 trillion parameters, referring to the size of its neural network.The Chinese company "acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models," Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a post on X on Wednesday. Nvidia, Moonshot AI, the White House and the U.K. embassy of the People's Republic of China have been approached for comment. Nvidia's most advanced AI chips are under export restrictions to China, though some less capable semiconductors are allowed to be shipped to the country. Nvidia's GB300 chips are one generation behind its frontier Vera Rubin systems and are still considered cutting edge.The U.S.-China AI arms raceThe release came as the race for AI supremacy between the U.S. and China inten...