White House official says Moonshot used Nvidia chips barred from China
The claim puts Nvidia’s AI hardware back at the center of U.S.-China tech controls as Chinese models close the performance gap.
By Theo Nakamura · Staff Writer
· 3 min read
A senior White House technology official accused Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI of getting access to Nvidia’s advanced chips even though U.S. rules restrict their sale to China. For investors, the claim keeps Nvidia and the wider AI supply chain tied closely to Washington’s export-control fight with Beijing.
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Wednesday on X that Moonshot “acquired GB300-equipped servers and has accessed GB300s in Thailand, likely to train its AI models.” Export controls are government limits on selling sensitive technology to certain countries or companies.
Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips are restricted from being exported to China, while some lower-powered semiconductors can still be shipped there. CNBC reported that Nvidia’s GB300 chips are one generation behind the company’s Vera Rubin systems but are still viewed as cutting-edge AI hardware.
Moonshot unveiled its Kimi K3 model on Friday. CNBC reported that Kimi K3 has narrowed the performance gap with frontier models including Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s GPT 5.6 Sol, and beat them on some benchmarks. The model has 2.8 trillion parameters, a measure of the size and complexity of an AI model’s neural network.
CNBC reported that Nvidia, Moonshot AI, the White House and the U.K. embassy of the People’s Republic of China had been contacted for comment.
Why chip access is the pressure point
The U.S. has tried to limit China’s access to the most powerful AI hardware because advanced chips are central to training large AI systems. Training is the process where a model learns patterns from large amounts of data, and more computing power can help companies build larger and more capable systems.
The issue is not limited to chips physically shipped into China. U.S. officials are also looking at whether Chinese companies can use restricted hardware through overseas data centers or cloud services.
In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that ByteDance was assembling computing power outside China to support its AI work. CNBC reported that ByteDance had been contacted for comment.
A bipartisan bill called the Remote Access Security Act would expand U.S. export controls to cover remote, cloud-based access to critical hardware and software. The legislation passed the House of Representatives in January and is awaiting Senate action, according to CNBC.
Keegan McBride, director of science and technology at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, told CNBC that China’s use of American computing resources is widely known. He said the situation shows “just how far ahead the US is on compute,” adding that “American compute is the foundation for the AI race today.”
Distillation claim adds another front
Kratsios also said on X that U.S. officials had information that Moonshot used distillation from Anthropic’s Fable model to develop Kimi K3. Distillation is a technique where a smaller AI model learns from the outputs of a larger, already trained model so it can imitate some of its performance.
Anthropic earlier this year alleged “industrial-scale” efforts to pull information from its model, CNBC reported. 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 raised the prospect of penalties on Wednesday. “When PRC firms conduct covert, industrial-scale distillation attacks that cross the line into IP theft, sanctions and Entity List designations will be on the table,” he said on X.
The claims arrive as Washington weighs tighter controls on AI infrastructure and Chinese companies push for more domestic alternatives to Nvidia hardware. CNBC reported that the U.S. cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips in May, though a senior U.S. trade official said earlier this month that “very few” had been shipped to China and Hong Kong.
This story draws on original reporting from CNBC.
