U.S. tech giants, including Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta, Microsoft, and Palantir, lobbied Donald Trump against a ban on Chinese AI after the launch of Kimi K3, an AI bot by Chinese start-up Moonshot. The White House threatened China with sanctions over claims Moonshot stole trade secrets from Anthropic via "distillation." Huang posted on X for the first time on Friday to oppose restrictions, saying, "AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." An open letter, backed by Elon Musk, warned against "concentrating AI capabilities behind a small number of closed models" and said, "The right response to this is not to prohibit open weights." The letter argued that open-weight AI can "expand opportunity, strengthen competition, extend American technological leadership, mitigate risk and ensure that the benefits of this extraordinary technology are shared broadly across our economy." A senior OpenAI executive claimed Beijing's strategy amounted to "full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes." Michael Kratsios, director of Trump's office of science and technology policy, accused Moonshot of using distillation against Anthropic's new, cutting-edge model.