U.S. Investigates Chinese AI Companies’ Access to Chips Amid Moonshot Accusations
Discussions to add Moonshot to the Commerce Department’s entity list are preliminary, according to an administration official.
This week, Trump administration officials have taken to the airwaves and X to blast Chinese open source AI companies like Moonshot, accusing them of stealing intellectual property from the likes of Anthropic and other U.S. AI developers. The administration’s concerns aren’t just rhetoric, though.
The Bureau of Industry and Security, an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce, is formally investigating whether Chinese firms like Moonshot, which last week released the Kimi K3 model, are accessing advanced U.S. AI chips, according to a BIS spokesperson. If the BIS investigation formally concludes that Moonshot improperly trained its AI models on those from a U.S. AI lab like Anthropic using U.S. chips, the Commerce Department could add the Chinese lab to its entity list, a BIS-enforced designation that restricts how foreign companies can access U.S. technology like advanced chips.