China accuses US of AI hegemonism, threatens countermeasures over Moonshot AI probe

China’s Ministry of Commerce fired back at Washington on July 27, accusing the United States of “AI hegemonism” and warning it would take “all necessary measures” to defend its technology interests. The statement came in response to growing US pressure over allegations that Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI essentially copied the work of Anthropic, one of America’s most prominent AI companies. What actually happened The dispute centers on a technique called model distillation. US officials, including White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, alleged that Moonshot AI used industrial-scale model distillation of Anthropic’s Claude models to build its own Kimi K3 AI system. In English: Washington believes Moonshot essentially trained its AI by feeding it outputs from Claude, absorbing the intelligence of Anthropic’s model without doing the underlying research work. The alleged operation wasn’t small. Anthropic reported over 3.4 million interactions connected to Moonshot through fraudulent accounts back in February 2026. Moonshot has denied everything, insisting that Kimi K3’s performance improvements stem from original architectural innovations rather ...