On this episode of, we dive into accusations that China's Moonshot AI stole from Anthropic, and how the US Army needs to cut back on AI use. This week on, our hosts break down the White House's accusation that Chinese-owned Moonshot AI distilled Anthropic's Fable 5 to build their much talked about Kimi K3 model. The team discusses whether this is a repeat of the DeepSeek moment and what it means for the AI race between the US and China. They also get into how the US Army--and plenty of Silicon Valley companies--are having to cut back AI usage after burning through their tokens. Plus, we discuss why you should check if you have an alarm that could make your car easier to hack, and how OpenAI briefly lost control of two AI models during a security test. Write to us at [email protected] . You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how: If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link . Today on the show, we're taking a look at how Chinese AI has been leveling up in a major way. The latest model released by Moonshot AI, one of the most well-known labs in China, has been drawing worldwide attention this past week because of the model's enormous capabilities. On Wednesday, White House director, Michael Kratsios, accused Moonshot of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable 5 model to build their own. We'll discuss whether we might be seeing another DeepSeek moment and what the AI race between the US and China actually means for users. We'll also get into how the US Army has been burning through their AI usage tokens and now find themselves in a position where they need to limit use. They're far from alone in having to pare back, though. Companies like Meta and Uber are already rethinking their AI usage as well because surprise, surprise, it's really expensive to use all these models. Also, on the docket for today, your car could have a hidden device that makes it more vulnerable to hacking.

China's Moonshot AI stole from Anthropic, Trump tech adviser says A White House adviser has accused China's Moonshot AI of a large scale effort to steal the capabilities of top US artificial intelligence (AI) models. US President Donald Trump's Science and Technology adviser Michael Kratsios said Moonshot AI carried out the campaign through what is known as distillation - when a weaker AI model extracts answers from a stronger one. Moonshot also gained access to restricted cutting-edge Nvidia servers to train its models, Kratsios said in a social post, external on Wednesday. The BBC has contacted Moonshot, the Chinese embassy in Washington, Anthropic, the White House, and Nvidia for comment. Kratsios said on X that the US government has information that Moonshot AI distilled capabilities from Anthropic's Fable AI for the development of its K3 model.

China's Open AI Models Are Challenging Silicon Valley's Playbook As access to Anthropic's and OpenAI's frontier models becomes more restricted, Chinese labs are pitching their open-source alternatives as stable, accessible, and increasingly capable. The AI industry is not quite experiencing a DeepSeek 2.0 moment, but it feels very close. The leading Chinese AI labs have been on a roll lately, releasing a series of almost cutting-edge open-source models. Z.ai released GLM 5.2 in June, Moonshot AI released Kimi K3 last week, and Alibaba released Qwen 3.8 this Monday. Silicon Valley and Washington started talking about the models immediately, especially K3, which is widely seen as the best of the bunch.

Moonshot AI's Kimi upends conventional wisdom on U.S. lead over China People walk past the Moonshot booth promoting its Kimi K3 AI model, during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on Friday. At an event in Beijing earlier this year, some of China's top artificial intelligence leaders warned that the country remained meaningfully behind the U.S. in developing cutting-edge AI models, with one executive arguing that "the gap may actually be widening." Leading U.S. firms also appeared confident they were significantly ahead. As recently as last week, one executive at Anthropic, who spoke on condition of anonymity, mused that the Claude maker's technology was roughly six to 12 months ahead of Chinese rivals. The Chinese AI lab released Kimi K3, a more advanced open-weight model that it said outperforms all rivals except for Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 on overall capability.

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. led the largest single financing round for a Chinese artificial intelligence startup, the latest in a string of sizable investments that suggest the e-commerce firm is again deploying capital in the hunt for growth. Alibaba joins Tencent Holdings Ltd. and Silicon Valley peers like Microsoft Corp. in placing big bets on generative AI, the technology that powers ChatGPT. It led a 1 billion funding round in Moonshot AI with existing backer Monolith Management, boosting the year-old firm's valuation eight-fold to some 2.5 billion, people familiar with the deal said. They joined previous backers including food delivery giant Meituan's investment arm Long-Z and Hongshan, formerly Sequoia China, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a private transaction. Founded in March 2023, Moonshot AI is among the better-known startups developing generative artificial intelligence in China, hoping to eventually match the likes of OpenAI and Google.