Chinese AI models like Kimi and DeepSeek are growing in popularity among Americans, including Mozilla CTO Raffi Krikorian, who switched to Moonshot's Kimi K3 for daily tasks, finding it "snappier" than Anthropic's Claude chatbot. US cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has also adopted Chinese AI models to reduce operating costs. The trend persists despite the Trump administration's tougher stance on Chinese technology, including accusations that Moonshot used "covert" methods to build Kimi K3 using Anthropic's Fable model, though those methods "may not necessarily have been illegal." US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned of potential further sanctions to protect American intellectual property. China has rejected accusations of "distillation" as "groundless." The competition intensified after Chinese startup DeepSeek surprised the tech world earlier this year by offering a similarly performing model at lower cost. Since then, Chinese companies launched Z.ai's GLM-5.2 in June and Moonshot's Kimi K3 in July, with Alibaba previewing its Qwen3.8 Max AI model in July. The report states that unless the US completely bans these models, they are likely to remain popular among developers.