"Circumventing Chips via Thailand"... White House Targets Moonshot AI

[Mexico City = Shim Young-jae, Special Correspondent] A senior official from the White House has raised suspicions that the Chinese artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI has unfairly utilized NVIDIA's advanced semiconductors and U.S. AI models to develop the Kimi K3. The claim is that Moonshot accessed GB300-based servers in Thailand, and if confirmed, it could raise issues regarding violations of U.S. semiconductor export controls.

Bloomberg reported on the 22nd (local time) that Michael Kratsios, head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, suggested that Moonshot may have secured servers equipped with GB300 and accessed the semiconductors in Thailand to train AI models. Moonshot has not officially commented on the related allegations.

Allegations of Access Through Thai Data Centers

Kratsios raised the possibility that Moonshot used NVIDIA's Blackwell-series GB300 servers in Thailand.

The GB300 is NVIDIA's latest Blackwell generation AI accelerator. The U.S. conditionally allows the sale of some H200 semiconductors to China, but restricts the sale of higher-performance Blackwell products to Chinese companies.

The U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security issued guidelines in May stating that companies headquartered in certain countries, including China, may also be subject to licensing requirements when using advanced computing equipment overseas. The guidelines explain that export control regulations may apply to transactions where overseas data centers train AI models using advanced semiconductors on behalf of Chinese companies.

The U.S. government is examining whether Chinese companies have circumvented regulations by accessing advanced AI semiconductors through subsidiaries or data centers in Southeast Asia.

However, it has not been confirmed whether Moonshot actually owns GB300 servers, whether it only used computing resources through third-party data centers, or whether it had U.S. government approval.

NVIDIA previously stated that it disagrees with claims regarding potential loopholes in export controls using overseas subsidiaries. Bloomberg reported that NVIDIA did not provide a separate response to Kratsios's recent claims.

Allegations of Distilling U.S. AI Models

Kratsios also claimed that Moonshot collected the outputs of U.S. AI models on a large scale to develop the Kimi K3.

Model distillation is a technique that uses the output results of a high-performing teacher model to train a relatively smaller student model. While this is a common AI development technique, it can lead to intellectual property and misuse controversies if data is collected in violation of other companies' terms of service or if model capabilities are replicated.

Moonshot claims that the Kimi K3 outperforms major competing models, excluding Anthropic's Claude Paevel 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6, in overall performance.

The performance announcement of the Kimi K3 has shaken the existing market perception that Chinese AI technology lags significantly behind leading U.S. companies. Following the related news, U.S. tech stocks showed weakness, reflecting a shock similar to that experienced during the unveiling of the DeepSeek model last year, according to Bloomberg.

Anthropic previously claimed that Moonshot utilized its model for distillation. OpenAI and Anthropic have also raised concerns that Chinese AI companies are systematically and unlawfully using the output results of U.S. models.

Moonshot has not responded to these claims. Therefore, the assertion that it unlawfully used U.S. models remains a claim from U.S. officials and companies and has not been independently verified.

U.S. Indicates Possibility of Sanctions and Blacklisting

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bensent also warned that the model distillation issues of Chinese open-source AI companies could be linked to potential intellectual property infringements.

Secretary Bensent stated that while the U.S. government supports open-source AI models, it will not tolerate the theft of intellectual property by foreign companies and may impose sanctions if necessary.

The Trump administration announced in April that it would consider additional measures to respond to hostile model distillation. In Congress, there are also proposals to blacklist or sanction Chinese companies that unfairly utilize U.S. AI models.

The U.S. Department of Commerce has been continuously strengthening related export controls to prevent advanced semiconductors and AI computing equipment from being used to enhance China's military and intelligence capabilities.

If the allegations regarding Moonshot's access to semiconductors and model distillation are confirmed, the U.S. government may consider measures such as export restrictions, transaction bans, and inclusion on sanctions lists.

On the other hand, if sanctions are pursued without confirming the specific transaction structure and the entity operating the servers, the political conflict surrounding U.S.-China AI competition could further escalate.

Regulatory Burden on NVIDIA

This controversy could also pose a burden on NVIDIA.

The U.S. government may require NVIDIA to strengthen customer verification and distribution channel management to prevent its advanced semiconductors from being provided to Chinese companies through third countries.

NVIDIA has been developing low-spec semiconductors that can be sold in the Chinese market. If the U.S. government expands regulations to include end users of overseas data centers, compliance costs for NVIDIA and cloud service providers may also increase.

The U.S. Department of Commerce introduced a policy in January to review the export licenses for some semiconductors, including H200 and AMD MI325X, on a case-by-case basis. The Blackwell series is reported to be subject to stronger restrictions than this.

The market sees the official investigation by the U.S. government into the Moonshot allegations, the results of NVIDIA's supply chain inspections, and the identity of the Thai server operator as key variables going forward.

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