White House official says Moonshot used Nvidia chips restricted for China

A senior White House technology official accused Chinese artificial intelligence company Moonshot AI of obtaining access to Nvidia GB300 chips, hardware covered by U.S. restrictions on sales to China. The allegation comes days after Moonshot released Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter open-source model, adding to policy pressure in Washington over how Chinese groups obtain high-end computing power.

Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in a post on X on Wednesday that Moonshot had “acquired GB300-equipped servers” and had accessed GB300s in Thailand, “likely to train its AI models.” CNBC reported that Nvidia, Moonshot AI, the White House and the U.K. embassy of the People’s Republic of China had been approached for comment.

Nvidia’s most powerful AI processors are subject to U.S. export controls for China, although Washington has allowed some lower-performance semiconductors to be sold into the country. The GB300 is behind Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin systems, but remains among the high-end chips used for training and operating large AI models.

Remote access under scrutiny

The Kratsios allegation highlights a central enforcement problem for U.S. technology controls: chips can be restricted at the border, while computing capacity can still be rented, hosted or accessed outside China. In that structure, a company does not need to import the physical processor if it can use servers installed in a third country or via cloud infrastructure.

U.S. lawmakers are considering the Remote Access Security Act, a bipartisan bill that would extend export controls to remote, cloud-based access to critical hardware and software. The measure passed the House of Representatives in January and is awaiting action in the Senate, according to CNBC.

Reports of Chinese companies seeking overseas compute have already drawn attention in Washington. The Wall Street Journal reported in March that ByteDance was assembling computing power outside China to support its AI work. CNBC reported that ByteDance had been approached for comment.

Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, told CNBC that China’s use of American compute inside and outside the country was “well known.” He said the pattern showed how far ahead the U.S. remained in compute, calling American compute “the foundation for the AI race today.”

Kimi K3 raises policy stakes

Moonshot introduced Kimi K3 on Friday. CNBC reported that the model narrowed the performance gap with leading systems including Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, and exceeded them on some benchmarks. Its 2.8 trillion parameters refer to the scale of the neural network behind the model.

The release arrives as U.S. officials and lawmakers focus on both hardware access and the use of Chinese AI models by Western companies. CNBC reported that the U.S. cleared 10 Chinese companies to buy Nvidia H200 chips in May, while a senior U.S. trade official said earlier this month that “very few” had been shipped to China and Hong Kong.

Kratsios also alleged on X that U.S. officials had information Moonshot “distilled” Anthropic’s Fable model while developing Kimi K3. Distillation is a training method in which one model is made to imitate the outputs or capabilities of a larger, more capable model by extracting knowledge from it.

Anthropic earlier this year alleged “industrial-scale” campaigns to extract information from its models, according to CNBC. A spokesperson for the U.K. embassy of the People’s Republic of China previously told CNBC that China “opposes baseless allegations and malicious smears against its AI development.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday on X that sanctions and Entity List designations would be considered when Chinese companies conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross into intellectual property theft.

This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.