Kimi K3's rise sparks a US-China AI distillation fight

Moonshot AI's open-weight Kimi K3 topped benchmarks including Program Bench and Automation Bench, prompting Anthropic to claim it was distilled from Claude — a charge echoed by White House science advisor Michael Kratsios. Researchers call the accusation implausible: Claude Opus was public only from June 1st, leaving too little time to distill and ship K3 two weeks later.