WASHINGTON: United States President Donald Trump is under pressure to respond to the increasing success of Chinese artificial intelligence models that many companies prefer to the more powerful, but pricier, US versions from Anthropic or OpenAI. The issue came to the fore this week with the release of Kimi K3 by Moonshot, which White House officials say was developed by stealing the capabilities of Anthropic's most powerful model through a process called distillation. The method is widely used across the industry, but US officials say Chinese firms have deployed it at scale to illicitly copy proprietary American systems. Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, on Wednesday (Jul 22) decried the practice and suggested that Moonshot had also circumvented US export curbs on powerful AI chips from Nvidia to build its products. The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is formally investigating Chinese firms like Moonshot over their use of these chips, a spokesperson told The Information.