Did China’s Moonshot AI Steal From Anthropic?; OpenAI Loses Control of Two Models
episodePreviously titled “Did China’s Moonshot AI Steal From Anthropic?; The U.S Army Burns Through AI Tokens” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 4, 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Zoe Schiffer, contributing editor.
I'm Brian Barrett, executive editor.
And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science. Today on the show, we're taking a look at how Chinese AI has been leveling up in a major way. The latest model released by Moonshot AI, one of the most well-known labs in China, has been drawing worldwide attention this past week because of the model's enormous capabilities. On Wednesday, White House Director Michael Kratzios accused Moonshot of illegally distilling Anthropic's Fable 5 model to build their own. We'll discuss whether we might be seeing another deep-seek moment and what the AI race between the U.S. and China actually means for users.
We'll also get into how the U.S. Army has been burning through their AI usage tokens and now find themselves in a position where they need to limit use. They're far from alone in having to pare back, though. Companies like Meta and Uber are already rethinking their AI usage as well, because surprise, surprise, it's really expensive to use all these models.
Who would have thought? Also on the docket for today, your car could have a hidden device that makes it more vulnerable to hacking. We're going to talk you through how to identify it and why some dealerships added it in the first place. And later in the show, how OpenAI lost control of two of its AI models during a recent security test.
So this past Friday, the Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI released their latest model called Kimi K3. And this news made major waves first because the model is super capable. It goes toe-to-toe with the leading frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic. And then today, White House Director Michael Kratzios, like we said at the top, basically accused Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropix models to build their own. So now a major kind of fight is breaking out. And this isn't the first time that Anthropix has accused a Chinese lab of distilling its models. I'm curious, Brian, Leah, what you think just right at the top.
Did the White House accuse Moonshot AI of stealing Anthropic’s model weights?
So Wired's Hugo Lowell, the author of our Inner Loop politics newsletter, has a piece that just came out this morning all about this, basically, entirely about how the Trump administration is really, really split over how to handle Chinese AI. And you have like all of these competing forces. You have the Commerce Department and Howard Lutnick that are saying, look, this isn't as scary as you think it is. We can we can figure some ways out of it. And then you actually also have people that are like, no, no, no, we have to create an executive order. We have to stop them. from stealing American AI? What do we do?
The Commerce Department's main tool to try and combat this so far has been export controls. And we're seeing some people say like, oh, this is proof that export controls are failing. But if Chinese labs are in fact just stealing proprietary information from AI companies in the United States, that's not necessarily a failure of export controls.
But it's also nothing that like an executive order could stop. Like, I'm sorry, but like executive orders from the United States do not apply to China. They just they don't. They can be strongly worded memos of with declarative intent. But no one's no one's getting in trouble there.
I want to back this up a little bit, too, because I think we haven't mentioned yet that what makes Kimmy K3 especially interesting, I think, in this context is that it's an open-weight AI system, which means it's not unlike the proprietary systems that are coming out of Anthropic and OpenAI and other US-based systems. AI giants, China has adopted this sort of more open model. A lot of Chinese companies have adopted this more open model where anyone can use these systems, anyone can tinker with them. Like it is a existential threat in some ways to companies that are saying, hey, look, we're going to charge you a ton of money to use ChatGPT or Claude. Here comes Moonshot, DeepSeek before saying, or you could just use this for free.
And it's just as good, almost.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:59
2
Did the White House accuse Moonshot AI of stealing Anthropic’s model weights?
1:59–6:17
3
How does Moonshot’s open-weight Kimi K3 compare to Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models?
6:17–12:08
4
Could export controls or executive orders stop Chinese labs from distilling US models?
12:08–14:27
5
Why might China favor open-weight AI and how could that reshape competition?
14:27–32:49
Speakers
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