OpenAI's Brockman comments that Kimi K3 is "quite good," but does not confirm the distillation process.

      Brockman referred to Kimi K3 from Moonshot as "pretty good," but noted it's too early to ascertain whether the model was trained by distilling outputs from OpenAI, a practice for which the company has accused Chinese labs. This cautious statement contrasted with the White House’s earlier specific allegations against the startup.

      OSTP Director Michael Kratsios claimed that Moonshot acquired prohibited Nvidia chips via intermediaries in Thailand and engaged in large-scale distillation of American AI models. These accusations coincided with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks that the administration would closely examine Chinese open-source models for potential intellectual property theft, possibly leading to sanctions soon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang countered the concerns by describing Chinese open models as "excellent" and advocating for American companies' access to them.

      The distillation accusations have been escalating for months. In February, Anthropic alleged that Moonshot, along with DeepSeek and MiniMax, had conducted around 16 million exchanges using approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to gather information from its Claude models. OpenAI has made similar claims, and the White House seems to regard these allegations as a national security issue rather than simply a commercial rivalry.

      Brockman highlighted OpenAI’s strong position due to its significant infrastructure investments, asserting that the US holds a "huge advantage" because of the billions allocated to computing. He argued that open-weight models like K3 aren't genuinely free, as operating them at scale necessitates costly hardware, challenging the notion that Chinese labs can easily distribute frontier-level AI. He estimated that China is still about four months behind the US in overall model development.

      K3, a nearly three-trillion-parameter open-weight model released by Moonshot on July 16, has disrupted both Washington and Wall Street by performing similarly or better than top American systems on various benchmarks. The model quickly ascended to the top of Arena’s coding leaderboard within a day of its launch, outperforming both Anthropic and OpenAI’s leading products. Moonshot is offering K3 at a significantly lower price than US labs, furthering concerns about the commoditization of the model layer that investors have warned about since DeepSeek’s price cuts earlier this year.

      Brockman, who has contributed to a super PAC aligned with Trump, chose not to engage in the debate regarding a potential ban on Chinese models. Instead, he emphasized OpenAI's belief in the importance of open models for "democratizing access to AI," aligning his view more with Huang than with the White House officials advocating for sanctions.