White House science advisor Michael Kratsios accused Moonshot, the Chinese company behind Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, of building its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips not cleared for export to China, calling it "large-scale, covert industrial distillation aimed at stealing proprietary U.S. technology." Moonshot did not respond to questions, and Kratsios did not share more details. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent echoed that "we are finding watermarks of our U.S. large language models on many of the Chinese models," though it is unclear what those watermarks consist of. However, experts are skeptical that distillation is responsible for Kimi K3's advanced capabilities. Braden Hancock of the Laude Institute and Snorkel AI noted, "I don’t think you get a model this strong and this quickly on the heels of Fable doing strictly distillation... Fable’s only been publicly available since July 1st. You can’t distill that much data, train a model, and release it in two weeks." Nathan Lambert of the Allen Institute for AI said distillation is "becoming less and less impactful over time" and that benefits from supervised fine-tuning are diminishing as models become more complex, suggesting that replicating Fable-like capabilities would likely require reinforcement learning techniques.