A quiet technique called "distillation" has become a central point of conflict between U.S. tech companies and Washington, following the release of a model named Kimi K3 by a Chinese lab called Moonshot AI that users found to rival top-tier commercial offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. Distillation is a way to train a smaller, cheaper AI model by learning from a bigger, more capable one. Google's head of AI, Jeff Dean, called it a "key technique for making smaller models more capable." More than 20 tech companies including Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Palantir signed a letter urging policymakers to avoid "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models. Anthropic stated that Chinese firms DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax had used roughly 24,000 fake accounts that produced 16 million interactions, effectively distilling the company's capabilities on an "industrial scale," and described halting unauthorized distillation as a matter of national security. Box CEO Aaron Levie remarked that for U.S. companies to remain competitive, they must have access to the best technology regardless of its origin.